Bitcoin is trading near $78,000 heading into the weekend after a sharp rejection from above $81,000 wiped out Friday's breakout. The pullback leaves $77,000 as the immediate support and $80,000 as resistance, with a Deribit options expiry and a pause in ETF inflows both set to shape which level breaks first.
Bitcoin sits near $78,000 heading into the weekend, caught between $77,000 support and $80,000 resistance after a sharp rejection from above $81,000 hit on Aug. 28. A confirmed break below $77,000 would open the mid-$75,000s, while a reclaim of $80,000 puts the roughly $81,300 high from Aug. 28 and the $82,000 to $83,000 zone back in range.
Warsh's Jackson Hole remarks reversed the breakout
Bitcoin reversed its Aug. 28 intraday high once Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole remarks lifted September rate-hike odds to around 55% from roughly 40% before the speech. Warsh said the Fed still had work to do if inflation failed to return toward its target.
That repricing pushed Bitcoin back below $80,000 by the close, turning a level buyers had briefly reclaimed back into resistance and leaving $77,000 as the line traders now have to defend.
Options expiry and ETF flows frame the weekend
Roughly 81,700 Bitcoin options worth about $6.44 billion expired on Deribit Friday at 08:00 UTC, removing a positioning cluster that had helped anchor price near key strikes through the week. Calls outnumbered puts by a ratio of 0.83, with the largest call interest concentrated around $75,000 and $80,000 — the same two levels now framing the weekend's downside and upside cases.
US-traded spot Bitcoin ETFs posted nine straight days of net inflows through Aug. 27, totaling roughly $3 billion. However, that demand pauses over the weekend, since ETF creation and redemption activity runs on the same weekday schedule as US equity trading. CME moved to 24/7 trading in late May, so regulated futures can still react to a weekend move even while the ETF channel sits idle.
Which side of the range wins first
A sustained reclaim of $80,000 would suggest buyers absorbed the Aug. 28 hawkish shock and turned the failed breakout into a bear trap, opening a path toward $81,300 and then the $82,000 to $83,000 zone. Losing $77,000 with sustained acceptance, by contrast, would flush out buyers who chased the earlier breakout and open $75,000 to $75,500 as the first bearish target, with $72,000 to $73,000 next if that level fails too.
Citi cut its 12-month Bitcoin target to $82,000 from $112,000 in July and set a recession-driven bear case near $53,000, so the weekend's own upside zone now overlaps with a major bank's full-year base case from eight weeks earlier. Bernstein's longer-term view sits far above any of this weekend's levels, pointing toward $150,000 by mid-2027 in a separate, longer timeframe.
Source: CryptoSlate
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