Bitcoin price over 72 hours: down 4.06% with open interest falling 6.1%

Bitcoin traded at $84,154 at 07:00 UTC on 12 October and $80,735 this morning, down 4.06% across 72 hours. Read the bitcoin price 72 hours at a time and the move looks orderly: three sessions, no single candle doing the damage. The low came at 06:00 today at $80,522, and the whole high-to-low range measures 4.51%. For a week that opened with a $175.6m ETF inflow, the market gave that back inside two sessions.

September inflation set it off. US CPI came in at 3.7% against expectations and revived the odds of an October rate hike, which is the reading Dominick John of Zeus Research gave below. Asian equities fell the same morning, so the selling was not confined to crypto.

“US inflation rising to 3.7%, above expectations, reignited fears that interest rates will stay higher for longer, putting pressure on risk assets”

— Dominick John, Analyst, Zeus Research

What the derivatives show

Open interest in Binance's BTCUSDT perpetual fell from $7.88bn to $7.39bn across the same 72 hours, down 6.1%, faster than the 4.06% the price lost. Funding stayed positive at 0.0044% per eight hours, about 4.8% a year, so longs still pay shorts to keep a position open. A market in panic usually flips that payment around, and this one has not.

Daily turnover across the market went from $26.6bn to $41.1bn, up 54% in a day, and CoinGlass counted roughly $483m of bitcoin and ether futures liquidations over 24 hours. We measured a heavier version of the same mechanism in September, when the liquidation wave did the work the oil story was given credit for.

What the analysts read

The analyst known as Murphy counted three touches of $81,000 on 9, 12 and 15 October and read the repetition as floating positions leaving one batch at a time. Others put the next support at $75,000 if the level breaks with conviction.

Bitcoin held up better than the rest of the market. Over 24 hours ether fell 5.95%, solana 4.82% and XRP 4.54%, against bitcoin's 3.12%. Anyone holding an index of the top ten lost more than anyone holding only the first line of it.

What settles next

Two things settle this one. Whether open interest keeps falling while the price steadies, which is what a cleared-out book looks like, and whether funding turns negative, which it has not. The ETF side gives the other half: the five trading days to 13 October still showed $597.6m of net redemptions.

Informational material, not investment advice. Prices, funding and open interest were read at 07:00 UTC on 15 October 2026 and change by the hour.