The market this morning

Bitcoin slips to $81,603.65 as Glassnode calls the market "boxed in" and ETFs turn sellers

By Crypto Info News

Good morning. The majors closed lower on 14 October. Bitcoin ended at $81,603.65, down 1.82% over 24 hours, with Ether at $2,419.69, down 3.08%. BNB fell 1.53% to $729.90 and XRP dropped 2.53% to $1.33. The two largest dollar stablecoins held close to par, with USDT at $0.9991 and USDC at $0.9997.

The backdrop came from Glassnode, whose week-on-chain note "Boxed In" said Bitcoin is stuck under the cost basis of the past two years' buyers and that the ETFs "are selling again," with September's CPI coming in hot. Glassnode added that the base holds: price sits above what it calls the True Market Mean and the ETF cost basis, loss-taking has dried up, and this bear has not closed below the Realized Price.

On adoption, Decrypt reported that Russia's biggest bank, Sberbank, won both custody and exchange status under the country's new crypto law and plans to bring Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT to apps used by 110 million retail clients. Decrypt also reported that Standard Chartered gained Dubai regulatory approval to let wealthy UAE clients buy BTC and ETH directly from their bank accounts, with custody and settlement kept in-house.

Regulation and policy moved in several places. Cointelegraph reported that the EU's banking authority classified Circle's USDC as a "significant" e-money token under MiCA, placing it under French and EU oversight. The Block reported that Patrick Witt's tenure as the White House's top crypto adviser came to an end as the Clarity Act stalls. Cointelegraph reported that an OCC report found debanking efforts tied to crypto activities, without specific examples, mentioned alongside oil, gas and firearms, and that industry-aligned organizations are pushing for summary judgment against a 0.2% Illinois crypto tax that officials already agreed to delay. On prediction markets, CoinDesk reported Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said he feels "pretty good" about the pending legal fight over who regulates the sector and that state-led oversight would push such markets out; The Block reported he defended the platform amid insider-trading concerns, saying its markets make bad actors easier to spot.

In enforcement, Cointelegraph reported that Brooklyn prosecutors and the FBI seized 112 servers and shut down 241 websites tied to investment scams targeting Russian-speaking Americans.

On infrastructure, Decrypt reported that Solana's Alpenglow upgrade replaces the TowerBFT voting system on 21 October, targeting finality of 150ms, down from 12.8 seconds, and removing vote transactions from blocks. Decrypt also reported a Chainalysis finding that payments through Coinbase's x402 protocol rose from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million by Q3 2026, most of them tiny and dominated by US wallets; Chainalysis separately described North America as a $3 trillion crypto economy.

What to watch: The Block reported that a major SkyAI shareholder, Bastion Trading, is pressing the firm on Solana sales after its SOL treasury fell 70% in under a month with 400,000 SOL unexplained, and that Bastion will not tender at $3 a share and wants $3.50.