Bitcoin's $80,000 floor: the cost-basis map behind October's range
ETF buyers, corporate treasuries and recent holders all cluster around a few price levels. Here is what the on-chain map shows and where it could break.
PRICE ANALYSISBITCOINANALYSIS
Hana Kimura
10/28/20263 min read
Bitcoin has spent most of October boxed in between roughly $79,000 and $85,000, and the reason is less mysterious than the daily headlines suggest. The range sits almost exactly on top of the average purchase prices of the market's largest recent buyers. When the price returns to the level where a big group of holders bought, their behaviour changes: some defend their entry, some sell to get out at breakeven, and liquidity piles up on both sides. Mapping those levels is the most useful way to read the current market.
Where the big buyers sit
Glassnode's weekly on-chain report of October 21 puts the average cost basis of US spot ETF holders at roughly $80,000, with publicly listed corporate treasuries close by at about $80,200. On October 15 bitcoin dipped to around $80,100 on an hourly basis, testing both groups at once. Bids at $80,000 that were filled that day had been rebuilt by October 20, according to the same analysis. Over the weekend of October 25 and 26 the price slipped below $80,000 again and touched about $79,300 before buyers stepped back in.
The overlap matters. ETF investors and treasury companies are the two cohorts that carried demand through 2024 and 2025. If bitcoin trades under their average entry for long, unrealised losses show up in fund statements and quarterly filings, and that can turn patient holders into sellers. So far every dip below the line has been brief, and that is the main reason the $80,000 area keeps holding.
Below that sits a deeper line. Glassnode's True Market Mean, an estimate of the average acquisition price of coins that are still economically active, stands near $77,600. A sustained break under it would mean the typical active holder is underwater, a condition that in past cycles came with heavier capitulation and much wider daily swings.
The ceiling is also a cost basis
Overhead, the map is just as crowded. Holders who bought six to twelve months ago have an average cost near $86,700, according to Glassnode, down from about $88,000 a week earlier. The one-to-two-year cohort sits around $100,000. The same report locates the main block of exchange sell orders between $86,500 and $87,500 and large liquidation clusters near $85,000 and $87,000. That explains why last week's push toward $85,000 stalled: each approach runs into holders keen to exit near breakeven and into resting supply on the order books.
Short-term holders, defined by Glassnode as wallets that have held their coins for less than 155 days, tell the same story from another angle. The share of their supply in profit fell to around 70% in late October from nearly 100% in late September. That is a cooling, not a panic. Realised profit-taking has slowed to about half its pace during the week of the September high, and daily coin movement by the one-to-two-year cohort has dropped to less than a third of its early October peak. Older holders, in other words, have largely finished the round of selling that capped the market earlier in the month.
Who is selling now
The pressure has moved down the size ladder. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost pointed out that 30-day cumulative retail deposits to Binance rose from about $5.5 billion to roughly $10.75 billion, the highest in six months, while whale deposits fell from $5.9 billion in late August to around $3.8 billion. A deposit is not a sale, but the shift suggests that smaller holders are the ones reaching for the exit while large wallets sit still. That pattern tends to look worse in price than it is in structure, because retail supply is spread thin and gets absorbed in pieces.
ETF flows remain the swing factor. After three days of inflows, US spot bitcoin funds lost about $635.6 million on October 22 and another $137.9 million on October 23, according to Farside data, with BlackRock's IBIT and Fidelity's FBTC accounting for most of the first day's withdrawals. Even so, the five-session balance stayed positive at about $301 million. Glassnode also notes that ETF trading volume is thin: the 30-day average is under a quarter of its level a year ago. Thin volume makes each large flow day count for more in price.
What to watch
This week loads three tests onto the same few days: the Federal Reserve decision on October 28, the September PCE inflation report on October 29 and a large monthly options expiry on Deribit on October 30. Any of them can push bitcoin to the edges of the map, and the levels above give a simple way to judge whether a move has substance.
Daily closes above roughly $86,700 would put the six-to-twelve-month cohort back in profit on average and remove a layer of breakeven sellers, opening the way toward the denser supply nearer $100,000. Closes below $77,600 would put the average active holder in the red and change the character of the market from a range to a drawdown. Between those two lines, October's chop is a negotiation between holders defending their cost basis and holders who just want their money back.