The Week in Data, Oct 26 to Nov 1: Bitcoin Loses $80K as Binance Reports a $6.3B Theft

For three days the week looked fine. Bitcoin ground up to $81,882 on Wednesday, the Fear and Greed Index sat at a placid 51 and US equities were green. Then Thursday arrived.

A hawkish Federal Reserve hold, misses from Alphabet and Samsung, and the largest crypto theft on record dragged bitcoin to $76,155 and sentiment to 30. BTC finished the week at $78,239.20, down 2.26 percent. Solana lost 6.76 percent. QQQ fell 3.47 percent on Friday alone.

Markets

Kraken's daily candles for the Monday to Sunday window (all figures in USD, UTC day boundaries):

Asset	Week open	Week close	High	Low	Change
BTC	80,048.70	78,239.20	81,882.00	76,155.50	-2.26%
ETH	2,326.62	2,272.35	2,389.93	2,170.00	-2.33%
SOL	101.25	94.41	103.81	92.15	-6.76%

The headline percentages understate the week. Bitcoin's Wednesday high and Friday low are 6.99 percent apart, and the whole move happened in roughly 48 hours. Thursday did most of the damage: BTC fell 4.29 percent on the day, ETH 4.59 percent and SOL 6.77 percent.

Thursday's trigger was not crypto-native. CoinDesk reported bitcoin sliding from above $81,700 to around $79,800 during the Asian session as Samsung's chip unit missed estimates and Alphabet reported Q3 operating income of $40.58 billion against $43.16 billion expected. Crypto futures liquidations ran to $356 million over 24 hours, $205 million of it longs.

Then late on Thursday, Binance disclosed a security incident. The exchange's own estimate is about $6.3 billion in token assets taken, with roughly $3 billion frozen on chain, after what its initial investigation described as a hacker reaching a compromised engineer's laptop. Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals and said it would cover losses. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM assessed with high confidence that the North Korea linked group TraderTraitor was responsible, and the FBI publicly attributed the breach to North Korea. It is the largest crypto theft on record by dollar value.

The Fear and Greed Index tracked the break cleanly: 50 (Neutral) on Monday, a peak of 51 on Wednesday and Thursday, then 30 (Fear) on Friday and Saturday before closing the week at 34. At the time of writing it reads 37, still Fear.

Equities told a milder version of the same story. SPY closed Friday at 755.72 against 759.97 the prior Friday, down 0.56 percent. QQQ went from 704.40 to 690.49, down 1.97 percent, the entire loss coming on Friday as weak results from Intel and Amazon revived worries about AI capital spending. The Nasdaq Composite fell about 2.9 percent that session and posted its worst month in over a year. At the time of writing both are recovering, with SPY at 759.92 and QQQ at 695.17.

Rates moved the other way. The Fed held its target range at 3.75 to 4.00 percent on Wednesday October 28 in a 10 to 2 vote, with Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack dissenting in favour of a quarter point hike and the statement noting that inflation "remains elevated". Despite that, Treasury yields fell across the curve as equities sold off. Against the prior Friday, the 2 year fell 13 basis points to 4.56 percent, the 10 year fell 6 to 4.94 percent and the 30 year slipped 2 to 5.31 percent, widening the 2s10s spread from 31 to 38 basis points.

Spot bitcoin ETFs finished the week net negative. Farside Investors data shows $440.8 million of inflows Monday through Thursday wiped out by a $643 million outflow on Friday, the largest single day withdrawal since June, leaving the week at about minus $202.4 million. IBIT led the Friday exit at $233.7 million.

Positioning

Hyperliquid open interest at the time of writing stands at $10.80 billion across 179 markets, up 1.1 percent over 24 hours. The feed keeps only about 26 hours of history, so there is no weekly comparison to make. BTC is the largest book at $3.23 billion, or 41,464 BTC, with open interest up 1.87 percent on the day. ETH holds $2.25 billion, or 980,099 ETH, down 0.33 percent. HYPE is third at $1.94 billion, up 3.39 percent, and Zcash fourth at $629 million, up 4.55 percent, the fastest growing book in the top five.

The ETH/BTC ratio closed at 0.02904, essentially unchanged from the prior week's 0.02906: ether fell with bitcoin rather than underperforming it. At the time of writing it reads 0.029411.

Prediction markets

Polymarket's volume board was almost entirely the US midterms, which fall on Tuesday November 3, and it moved toward Democrats all week (prices at the time of writing, one week changes in percentage points):

Democratic Senate control: 73.5 cents, up 9 points on $2.78 million of weekly volume.
Republican Senate control: 27.5 cents, down 8 points.
Balance of power, Democratic Senate and Democratic House: 71.5 cents, up 6 points, on $4.51 million.
Democrats to win the Michigan Senate race: 79.5 cents, up 11.5 points.
Democrats to win the Texas Senate race: 75.5 cents, up 11 points, on $1.71 million.

Republicans still hold the Texas governor's race at 62.65 cents, down 4.75 points on the week. No source we fetched explains the shift, so treat these as what the money did, not why. More on how the prices work in the prediction market glossary.

The planet

USGS counted 136 earthquakes at magnitude 4.5 or above inside the window, well down from 210 the week before. Fourteen reached M5.5 and five reached M6.0:

M6.4 southeast of Easter Island, Thursday October 29 at 07:49 UTC, 10 km deep.
M6.2, 43 km ESE of Port-Olry, Vanuatu, Thursday October 29 at 21:46 UTC, 143 km deep.
M6.0, 214 km NW of Port-Olry, Vanuatu, Wednesday October 28 at 02:21 UTC, 10 km deep.
M6.0, 58 km SSE of Shima, Japan, Saturday October 31 at 22:15 UTC, 352 km deep.
M6.0, 165 km NW of Port-Olry, Vanuatu, Sunday November 1 at 11:47 UTC, 10 km deep.

Three of the five clustered around Vanuatu. All carried green PAGER alerts; none triggered a tsunami flag.

GDACS issued one Red alert inside the window: tropical cyclone MURASU-26 in the North Indian basin, at Category 1 strength with maximum winds of 120 km/h, affecting India, with GDACS estimating 1.457 million people exposed to Category 1 winds or higher. Three Orange drought alerts covering Europe, Central America and the Caribbean, and East and Central Africa remained on the feed, but all began months ago and are not new this week.

No volcano reporting for this window: the Smithsonian and USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report's most recent edition was published on October 15 and still covers October 8 to 14.

Space

A quiet week on the pad: three orbital launches flew, all successful.

Tuesday October 27: SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5, Starlink Group 15-16, Vandenberg SFB.
Friday October 30: ISRO GSLV Mk. II, carrying IRNSS-1L (NVS-03), Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
Saturday October 31: SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5, Starlink Group 15-18, Vandenberg SFB.

The internet

A rough week for infrastructure. Cloudflare opened 25 incidents inside the window, one rated major: "ERR_TIMED_OUT and ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE being observed by Cloudflare Customers", from 12:28 to 15:12 UTC on Tuesday October 27. Wednesday and Thursday brought a cluster of Durable Objects, Workers, D1 and R2 error reports, mostly in Eastern North America and Eastern Europe.

GitHub opened seven, three of them serious: a critical Copilot disruption on Wednesday (14:12 to 15:28 UTC), a critical "Disruption with GitHub services" on Friday (14:31 to 15:02 UTC) and a major incident hitting Actions, Pages and Webhooks later that Friday (17:50 to 19:23 UTC). OpenAI opened five, none above minor. Anthropic's status endpoint returned a redirect rather than JSON when we fetched it, so we have no figure there.

At the time of writing Cloudflare's status page reports a partial system outage. On our side, 115 of 118 tracked feeds are live, two idle and one stalled: the museum art feed has been quiet for 282 hours. Current state is always on the status page.

The week ahead

Tuesday November 3: US midterm elections. Polymarket's balance of power markets settle at 04:59 UTC on November 4.
Friday November 6: October Employment Situation report from the BLS, 8:30 am ET.
Tuesday November 10: October CPI, 8:30 am ET, just outside the week but the last inflation print before December's Fed meeting.
Monday November 2, 16:41 UTC: Rocket Lab Electron, "The Sea God Surveys" (iQPS Launch 9), status Go.
Wednesday November 4, 01:28 UTC: SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5, USSF-432, status Go.