Bitcoin Falls to $76,500, a Two-Month Low, on Election Day as Binance's Emergency Fund Is Shown Half Spent

Bitcoin fell about 2 percent to $76,565.90 by 06:25 GMT on Tuesday, its lowest since early September, as Americans began voting in the midterms, Investing.com reported. The move erased Monday's rebound to about $78,000 and left the coin close to its September low, with the total crypto market capitalisation down 2.54 percent on the day to $2.57 trillion, TradingKey said.

Ether was down about 2 percent to just above $2,250, Solana down 3 percent near $92, BNB back below $700 and Zcash down nearly 10 percent after leading Monday, CoinDesk reported. XRP held at $1.25 and Tron was the only major in the green.

Why is bitcoin down on election day?

Three weights at once. The first is the same chip sell-off hurting Seoul this morning: a gauge of US semiconductor makers extended its three-day slide to 12 percent and the Nasdaq 100 is 10 percent off its peak, and bitcoin has traded as the highest-beta expression of that risk. The second is the vote itself. Investing.com's Ambar Warrick wrote that traders were avoiding crypto over uncertainty about the regulatory outlook, since a Democratic sweep of Congress would probably block new pro-crypto legislation for two years after the CLARITY Act stalled earlier in 2026, leaving the executive branch as the only mover. Polymarket and Kalshi have put that outcome in focus, CoinDesk noted. The third is Binance, which we have followed since the night of the hack: spot bitcoin ETFs saw more than $1 billion of net outflows over the two trading days to Monday, TradingKey said, after Friday's $643 million, the largest single-day outflow since June.

How much of Binance's SAFU fund is left?

About half. The Secure Asset Fund for Users wallet held just over 7,500 BTC on Tuesday after four transactions on 31 October cut its bitcoin holdings in half, according to mempool.space data cited by CoinDesk. The wallet held 15,000 BTC in February, when Binance converted the roughly $1 billion fund from stablecoins into bitcoin; at about $77,000 a coin the remainder is worth about $580 million. Binance said on 31 October that it would draw partly on SAFU, alongside its corporate treasury and part of its futures insurance fund, for the $6.34 billion it set aside to cover the $6.3 billion theft, and it has pledged to restore the fund to about $1 billion without giving a date. Its own FAQ says the fund is rebalanced to $1 billion if it falls below $800 million "due to BTC price fluctuations", a rule written for a falling price, not for spending.