Bitcoin recovered to around $82,500 after President Donald Trump said the United States would not attack Iran before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The cryptocurrency remained about 4% lower than a week earlier, while ether had declined 9% over the same period.

Bitcoin was trading at $82,973.68 heading into the weekend, compared with about $80,300 at Thursday’s low. The rebound followed a Thursday post by Trump on Truth Social in which he said the U.S. would not attack Iran before the midterm elections. Brent crude was down about 1% on the day at roughly $103 a barrel. The synchronized repricing across crypto, equity futures and crude showed how quickly risk assets moved on a single geopolitical headline — one with a built-in next checkpoint in the Nov. 3 election date.

Smaller tokens led the recovery. The CoinDesk 80, a broad index of tokens beyond the very largest, rose 2.2% since midnight UTC, more than twice the gain in the CoinDesk 5, which tracks the five largest digital assets. The rebound did not erase Thursday’s losses: the CoinDesk 100 remained down 2.2% over 24 hours, while decentralized-finance tokens — which track trading and lending protocols that operate without traditional intermediaries — had fallen nearly 4%.

U.S.-listed bitcoin, ether and zcash exchange-traded funds recorded outflows on Thursday, leaving XRP funds the only crypto products to attract inflows. ETF flows are widely followed as a gauge of institutional participation in crypto markets, and whether Thursday’s outflows continue in coming sessions is a data point traders will watch.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake’s call for a “bunker mode,” which contributed to negative sentiment alongside Thursday’s selloff, also drew criticism. Coinbase cryptographer Yehuda Lindell described the concerns as “FUD” — fear, uncertainty and doubt — and said there was no evidence that the elliptic-curve assumptions underlying bitcoin and ether had been broken. Elliptic-curve cryptography is the digital-signature system that secures transactions on both networks.

U.S. equity futures also rose after Trump’s comments. Nasdaq 100 futures were up 0.83% since midnight, while S&P 500 futures added 0.44%.

Derivatives positioning

Bitcoin futures open interest fell 1.9% over 24 hours to $27.1 billion, according to Coinalyze. Open interest measures the total value of outstanding futures contracts and is often read as a gauge of leverage in the market. It had barely changed since Thursday afternoon’s flush even as bitcoin recovered toward $82,500, indicating that the rebound occurred without a significant increase in leverage.

Funding rates remained positive at about 5% annualized, with the predicted rate slightly higher. That means traders holding long positions continued to pay funding. Deribit’s Oct. 30 futures traded at an annualized basis of about 7%, a measure of how far the futures price stands above spot.

Long bitcoin positions outnumbered shorts by nearly two to one. Coinalyze’s aggregated long-short ratio stood at 1.85, equivalent to roughly 65% long positions, up from near parity at the beginning of the month.

CoinGlass data showed $1.09 billion in liquidations — forced closures of leveraged positions — over the previous 24 hours. Long positions accounted for $931 million, or about 85% of the total. Ether led liquidations at $345 million, followed by bitcoin at $266 million and solana at $65 million. The largest individual liquidation was a $20 million ETH-USD position on Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetuals exchange.

Token performance

Starknet’s STRK token, priced at $0.1094, rose 33% over 24 hours after the network said it was actively considering leaving Ethereum to become a standalone layer-1 blockchain. Layer-2 networks like Starknet process transactions off Ethereum’s main chain and settle back to it for security, so a departure would make Starknet an independent base layer in its own right. The proposal targets full quantum resistance by 2027 and has not yet been approved.

The proposal came days after Pudgy Penguins’ Abstract became the second Ethereum layer-2 network to shut down in one week.

Kaia, the layer-1 blockchain created through the merger of Kakao’s Klaytn and LINE’s Finschia, rose 40% since midnight after being listed by Upbit, South Korea’s largest exchange. Other layer-1 tokens also advanced: Aptos’ APT, at $0.8420, gained 12%, while Cosmos’ ATOM, at $1.9239, and Polkadot’s DOT, at $1.2309, each rose nearly 10%.

Some of Thursday’s largest gainers reversed course. Algorand’s ALGO, priced at $0.1190, had led the CoinDesk 100 with a 9% gain Thursday morning but was down 14% over 24 hours. Curve’s CRV, at $0.3635, fell 13% after rising 11%.

Two artificial-intelligence-related tokens did not participate in the recovery after a disclosure about OpenAI’s revenue weighed on AI stocks. CNBC reported Thursday that OpenAI had told investors it generated $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September. That figure was below the $68 billion widely reported the previous month. The Nasdaq Composite subsequently recorded its largest one-day decline since mid-August.

The AI-agent payments token Kite’s KITE, priced at $0.1264, and Venice’s VVV, at $22.52, each fell about 9% over 24 hours and remained slightly lower since midnight.

Pyth Network’s PYTH, the oracle token, rose 13% over 24 hours, making it one of the few tokens that was higher over both the 24-hour and since-midnight periods. Pyth supplies price-feed data that trading applications use across blockchains.

Source: CoinDesk