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BREAKING: Bitcoin circles $81.5K ETF cost basis as Trump Iran comments send stocks lower

If you bought into a spot Bitcoin ETF, the average buyer alongside you is roughly back where they started.

Bitcoin fell about 4% on Thursday to around $81,400, right on the price the funds paid for their coins on average, about $81,500 by Cointelegraph's count.

On Wednesday it had broken through $84,000, the level that turned it back twice last week, and topped out near $84,800.

Then Tesla and Meta's results revived doubts about the AI trade, and the Nasdaq closed down 2.6%.

Oil climbed above $111 after overnight strikes, and Trump told reporters the US is "not negotiating" with Iran.

A week ago, a bond rally helped Bitcoin bounce off an AI scare within hours.

This time bonds rallied even harder, pulling 10-year Treasury yields down about 20 basis points to under 5%, and bets on a Fed hike next week all but vanished.

Bitcoin kept sliding anyway, as investors hid in Treasuries and defensive stocks like Walmart and Procter & Gamble and sold it alongside tech.

The ETF buyers came back in force this week, though…

They put $1.08 billion into the funds from Monday to Wednesday.

It works out to about $360 million a day, faster than the $200 million-plus daily pace behind each of the funds' three steep rallies since 2024, CoinDesk's numbers show.

Since July they've averaged about $86 million a day.

Glassnode says buyers stepped in near that same average price when Bitcoin dipped to $80,000 last week.

As the price slid on Thursday, ETF investors pulled more than $600 million back out, by Farside's count.

The funds bought at rally pace for three days, and those purchases are already slightly under water… 🚀

Every time you fill up or open your power bill, an energy company gets paid. Gas prices just set an October record. Iran is firing on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and Russia's oil exports are getting choked off by attacks on its tankers and oil infrastructure.

Then there's AI. Data centers are pulling power off America's grid faster than anyone can build it, and tech giants are signing deals for entire power plants just to keep their servers running.

So the best performing sector of 2026 isn't tech, and it isn't AI. It's energy, up around 40% this year while most investors were busy chasing chip stocks.

We've found the #1 energy stock to end 2026 strong. Get it free, and we'll text you the name.

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Larry Lepard has a blunt message for the Bitcoiners celebrating gold's alchemy moment this week.

He's a veteran investor and author of "The Big Print", one of the most articulate voices on monetary debasement.

Here's what he posted:

The fuss started when Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco startup, said it had turned mercury into stable gold using neutrons from a fusion reaction, at 10 times the record CERN reported last year.

Castle Island's Nic Carter called it "gold's quantum FUD" (the fear that quantum computers could one day crack Bitcoin's signatures).

Lepard wants to know what it costs per ounce, and Marathon hasn't said, or even how much gold it made.

For scale, CERN's run made about 29 trillionths of a gram between 2015 and 2018.

Marathon's own 2025 paper models around 2 tonnes of gold a year per gigawatt of fusion power.

Miners dig up roughly 3,600 tonnes a year, so matching them would take about 1,800 gigawatts of fusion plants by our count, and no commercial fusion power plant exists yet.

Gold's scarcity has always rested on what it costs to get out of the ground, though…

Make it cheap enough to produce and the supply grows.

With Bitcoin, more computing power only makes mining harder, so the network still issues 3.125 coins per block on the way to 21 million.

For now, the cheapest way to get more gold is still a shovel ⚗️

Today we'll be taking a look at the amount of Bitcoin available for sale on exchanges.

Here's how to interpret this metric:

2.686 million BTC on exchanges. Up from 2.684 million two weeks ago.

After a fortnight of hefty outflows, the balance barely budged this time.

Only about 2,000 Bitcoin moved onto exchanges on net, against the 43,000 that left the print before.

That's less than 0.1% of the exchange float, close to a dead heat between coins arriving and coins leaving.

At current prices it's roughly $164 million of Bitcoin.

The balance still sits 41,000 BTC below the 2.727 million of a month ago.

The coins that left two weeks ago have stayed gone. 📥

a16z Drops Crypto From Its Name, Widens Bets to AI and Frontier Tech. Andreessen Horowitz is renaming its crypto fund a16z Frontier and adding AI, autonomous machines and biology, while saying it will keep investing in crypto.

SoFi unveils bank-issued tokenized deposit for yield-bearing crypto funds. SoFi Earn pays a variable 4.4% with FDIC coverage up to $250,000 and converts one-for-one into the bank's SoFiUSD stablecoin.

Crypto custody specialist Fireblocks denies it's in talks to be acquired by Visa. Axios had reported a $2.5 billion deal, well below the $8 billion valuation Fireblocks raised money at in 2022.

JPMorgan says crypto regulatory moves partly offset Clarity Act failure, but risks remain. Its analysts said agency rules could be reversed within two years under a Democratic president, and that the bill may return in 2027.

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Select your answer below and you’ll be redirected to the results page. (answer explanation can be found after “Meme Corner”)

Because what would the crypto world be without its share of memes?

Trivia Answer: Creates new bitcoin and pays the miner the block reward plus fees 🥳

The coinbase transaction has no inputs. It mints the block subsidy and adds the fees from every transaction in the block, and the exchange Coinbase later borrowed its name.

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