Bitcoin is $81,377 this morning, down 2.8% in 24 hours, in the CoinGecko reading from 00:23 UTC. It's the lowest of our 17 daily readings since 27 September. Ether fell 4.5% to $2,423 and solana fell 6.4% to $104.03.

The Block reports $771 million of liquidations across crypto derivatives in 24 hours, about 89% of them on bets that prices would rise. A liquidation is an exchange closing a trader's borrowed-money bet after the price moves against it. Most of the forced selling came from people who were betting on a rise. Each forced sale pushes the price lower, which can push the next trader's bet past its limit.

Funds were selling too. In its Week 42 report, Glassnode's weekly measure of money moving in and out of US spot bitcoin ETFs went from $117.9 million of inflows to $701.6 million of outflows. That's far below its usual range.

Glassnode also found that open interest, the total value of bets still open on perpetual futures (contracts with no expiry date), stayed near the top of its range at $36.7 billion. Traders took their losses and kept their bets open. If the price keeps falling, more of those bets get closed out for them.

Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack says interest rates aren't yet high enough, according to the Wall Street Journal. On Polymarket, the market on a quarter-point rate rise at the Fed's 28 October meeting is at 20%.

Glassnode says funds and traders using borrowed money led the selling. Just over 70% of bitcoin's supply is still in profit, and new buyers kept arriving on-chain through the slide. If you hold coins without borrowing against them, the liquidations are other people's losses.

South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit has ordered the country to block access to 27 overseas crypto exchange websites that aren't registered there, The Block and Wu Blockchain report. The list includes KuCoin, MEXC, Phemex, XT.com, Bitrue, CoinW, Poloniex, BTCC, BingX and BitMart.

The order follows reviews on 6 and 7 October and adds to existing limits on those exchanges' app downloads and updates. The unit has referred 44 unregistered operators to investigators and plans to ask for blocks on the alternative web addresses people use to get around them.

Wu Blockchain, citing the South Korean outlet Etoday, says affected users will get withdrawal guidance through DAXA, the association of South Korean exchanges. We've seen the announcement only as relayed. If your coins sit on one of the ten named exchanges, that guidance is the part to read.

IREN, a bitcoin miner turned AI infrastructure company, has reportedly signed a multiyear deal to supply AI cloud computing to Anthropic, according to The Information. It's unclear whether this is the same deal with an unnamed AI lab that IREN disclosed in August.

A second miner is making the same move. SWI Group, the Amsterdam-listed company that runs bitcoin-mining operations once part of Sam Bankman-Fried's bankrupt FTX, raised around $900 million to expand its data centers, the Journal reports. It plans to offer computing capacity to big tech companies working on AI. Its shares rose more than 16%.

Miners already hold the power contracts and data centers AI companies want, so they have a second customer for the same buildings. If you hold bitcoin, the companies that secure the network are spending more of their effort on something else.