Bitcoin fell below $80,000 on Thursday, October 29, 2026. In early afternoon trading it changed hands at $79,979.85, down 1.58% over 24 hours, after a session high of $81,262.04 and a low of $79,614.36. The drag is caution on interest rates after the Federal Reserve meeting chaired by Kevin Warsh.
The day before, Bitcoin closed essentially flat (+0.03%), trading between $80,538.88 and $80,964.55. The drop comes after that pause rather than in the middle of a vertical collapse, but the price sits in the lower part of the range it has held for several days.
The context: Warsh’s Fed does not clear the doubts
On October 28, 2026, the Fed held interest rates in the 3.75% to 4% range. It was the first meeting chaired by Warsh, who succeeded Jerome Powell after Senate confirmation in May.
In the official Fed statement of October 28, 2026, the FOMC writes that inflation “remains elevated.” The September reading, 3.7% year over year, is nearly double the central bank’s 2% target.
The decision was not unanimous. Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack would have preferred a quarter-point increase. For cryptocurrencies, that dissent is an uncomfortable signal: some voices inside the Fed are arguing for higher rates, not lower ones, and therefore less liquidity for investors with a bigger appetite for risk.
Markets are already pricing in another increase at the December 8-9 meeting, after the one delivered in September, the first since 2023.
As long as the cost of money is rising rather than falling, the assets most sensitive to liquidity struggle to find momentum. Ethereum is having a similar day, under pressure from three sessions of outflows from spot ETFs.
The theme is not new for Bitcoin. Money.it’s research desk wrote about it days ago, examining how the link between gold and Bitcoin was tested by the late-October selling, at a point when the price had begun to lose ground after September’s rate increase.
The technical picture remains fragile
The charts offer little comfort to anyone looking for a turning point. The price has fallen below both short-term moving averages: the 20-session, at $81,768.15, and the 50-session, at $81,789.15. It still holds above the 200-session average, steady at $73,031.77, which keeps the underlying trend intact despite the correction.
The 14-session RSI - the indicator that measures whether an asset is moving too quickly in one direction - sits at 45.4, a neutral zone that flags neither overbought nor oversold conditions. The MACD is negative and below its own signal line, a sign the downward push has not yet run its course.
The Bollinger Bands, which measure how much the price swings relative to its own recent average, are narrow, between $79,662.95 and $83,873.35. Volatility is compressed, and today’s low stopped just below the lower band. The ADX, which measures the strength of a trend regardless of direction, is also low at 17.7: the current move is weak, closer to a sideways market than to a clear direction.
Looking beyond a single session
Bitcoin has lost 5.59% over the past month. It is still up nearly 20% since the start of the year, thanks to the rally that began from January’s lows.
Fibonacci retracements are price levels, calculated as percentages of a previous move, where analysts often expect a pause or a reversal. Applied to Bitcoin’s rise over the past six months - between $58,045.93 and $87,281.16 - they put the first such level around $76,100. The Hurst exponent, a statistical measure of how far a market tends to continue its own trend instead of reversing abruptly, stands at 0.66. That points the same way, but is not high enough to signal a strong, unambiguous trend.
Bitcoin is reacting to the Fed, which for now is not promising cheap liquidity, rather than to anything specific to the cryptocurrency itself.
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Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Ufficio Studi Money.it on October 29, 2026 as «Bitcoin sotto gli 80.000 dollari: pesano la Fed di Warsh e la tecnica debole». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
