Bitcoin sinks below $75.6K as stablecoin supply and ETF money drain away

Bitcoin keeps sliding, and it's now trading under the $75.6K line that separates winners from losers among recent buyers. That threshold is the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis — the average price paid by investors who bought in the last 155 days. At $74K, the coin sits inside the $73K-$76K band that analysts flag as critical support. It's still well above June's low of $58.5K, so the uptrend that started in August hasn't broken.

The liquidity backdrop is thinning fast. Stablecoin supply has shrunk by $14.2 billion over 30 days, the sharpest contraction since June 2022, as holders cash out of tokens that normally sit ready to buy risk. Tether, the biggest of them, is trading just under its $1 peg. On the fund side, US spot ETFs have bled $1.6 billion in net outflows across the past 20 sessions, past the $1.5 billion mark that defines an outflow stretch. Over on Coinbase, the exchange where US money does most of its crypto trading, Bitcoin keeps changing hands at a discount — its 30-day average premium is negative.

Not everyone is heading for the exits. Wallets holding between 100 and 1,000 BTC, and the bigger crowd sitting on 1,000 to 10,000 BTC, flipped from selling to accumulating over the past week. The fall has also wiped out much of the leverage parked near current prices, cutting the odds of forced liquidations, even as futures open interest has rebuilt to September-high levels — a sign shorts are stacking up. In the spot order book, bids within 5% of the price outweigh asks, with heavy buy orders clustered between $68K and $72.5K, while sell orders stay thin all the way up to $84K.

The levels to watch are clear. A sustained drop under $73K would point to a drawn-out consolidation, according to Blockchain.News, while climbing back above the True Market Mean of $77.5K would put roughly half of short-term holders back in profit.