After a white-hot week for Bitcoin in which the leading cryptocurrency came $175 away from its all-time high price, BTC momentum is cooling again, with its price dipping as self-proclaimed crypto candidate Donald Trump faces fresh warning signs ahead of Election Day.
Bitcoin dipped as low as $67,569 on Sunday, per data from CoinGecko, returning below the $68,000 mark for the first time in about a week. Back up to $68,040 as of this writing, Bitcoin is down by nearly 2% on the day, but still up by about 1% over the past seven days.
Last Tuesday, Bitcoin spiked above $73,000 for the first time in months, and came within a couple hundred dollars of setting a new all-time high price before cooling off. Last week was also huge for Bitcoin ETFs, with billions of dollars rushing into the American funds—most of it going to BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).
Bitcoin began cooling off on Thursday and continued into the weekend, but slipped below the $68,000 mark amid new doubts around the prospect of crypto advocate Donald Trump claiming a second term as president.
A new poll released Saturday by veteran pollster Ann Selzer suggests that the Republican candidate could lose Iowa to VP Kamala Harris, with the Democrat up 47% to 44%. Trump has carried the state in the last two elections, and while the poll is an outlier compared to others, Selzer is considered uncannily accurate and is one of the best-rated pollsters by FiveThirtyEight.
News of the poll sent ripples across the political world Saturday, amid questions over whether the poll pointed to other potential surprises results ahead in swing states. Amid the speculation, Trump's dominant lead on prediction market platforms started to collapse.
Trump held a commanding 67% chance of winning the election as of last Wednesday on leading platform Polymarket, compared to 33% for Harris at the time. By Sunday early afternoon, the odds of a Trump win sat at 60% compared to 40% for Harris.
Now, the site shows a 54% chance for Trump and 46% for Harris. Polymarket has now handled over $3 billion worth of trading volume solely on the market for the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
Over at Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated prediction market platform that just added crypto support via USDC, Harris has held a lead on multiple occasions since Sunday night, and the candidates remain close as of this writing with Trump at 51% and Harris at 49%. Last week, they were nearly as far apart on Kalshi as they were on Polymarket at the peak.
These prediction market results have typically shown a very different spread than traditional national polls, however, with Harris leading 51% to 47% in the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll from October 22.
As bettors recalibrate their predictions going into Tuesday, the growing doubts around Trump—who many analysts have said will be better for the future of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in America—may have played a role in Bitcoin's recent slide. And as Bitcoin goes, so too does most of the crypto market.
Given last week's hot streak too, the resulting dip has rocked many traders who were betting on the price of BTC to go up. Total crypto market liquidations exceed $315 million over the past 24 hours, per data from CoinGlass, with long positions making up $250 million of that sum. Bitcoin positions made up over $76 million of the grand total.
