Bitcoin Clings to $75,000 as $1.25 Billion Is Liquidated and a $2.7 Billion Options Expiry Lands Before the Jobs Report
Crypto fell less than the Nasdaq on Thursday, but almost nine in ten liquidated positions were longs, and Friday's Deribit expiry settles five hours before the US payrolls figure.
Friday, November 6, 2026/2 min read
Bitcoin spent the early hours of Friday doing something unusual for an asset that usually trades like a leveraged tech stock: it fell less than tech. On Thursday the Nasdaq 100 dropped 6.4 percent and bitcoin 5.3 percent, and by Asia's morning it was sitting at roughly $75,600 after touching about $75,200, down around 6 percent on the day, according to Bitcoin.com News. That erased the short squeeze that followed the midterm result, which we covered in our report on Thursday's slide below $76,000.
The cost was borne by traders who had bought the bounce. Crypto liquidations topped $1.25 billion in 24 hours, with almost 90 percent of them on long positions, the same report found.
Why is bitcoin falling today?
The proximate cause is Wall Street. Investors fear that a Democratic Congress will slow the data-centre boom behind the AI trade, and bitcoin, which has traded in step with equities for weeks, followed. The analyst Alex Krüger called its relative resilience rare, and Fundstrat's Tom Lee described the drop as "Liberation Day plus DeepSeek". Seoul and Tokyo were closing sharply lower as the report was written.
CryptoTicker put the 24-hour range at $75,230 to $80,721 and noted that the election-night low of $75,740 had broken. Its map of the chart is simple: support at $75,230 and then the 200-day line near $73,200, with resistance at the 100-day line near $76,950 and then $80,000. Ether fell harder than bitcoin, down more than 8 percent on Phemex's ticker.
What is the Deribit options expiry on 6 November?
About $2.7 billion in bitcoin options expire on Deribit at 08:00 UTC, with another $225 million or so in ether. Phemex, summarising PANews, put the bitcoin expiry at $2.64 billion with a put-call ratio of 0.38 and a max-pain price of $79,000, well above where the market stands. Calls are concentrated at the $82,000 and $85,000 strikes, which are now out of reach. According to Cryptonews, put interest clusters between $72,000 and $75,000, and puts settle on an average price between 07:30 and 08:00 UTC, so they do not cover the jobs report.
The Bitcoin.com article adds that no calls at or below $75,000 remain, which leaves a large payout for bears if bitcoin closes under that level. Cryptonews cautions that max pain does not guarantee that price will gravitate toward it, and that its strike-level figures were digitised from a screenshot rather than a verified feed.
What does the US jobs report mean for bitcoin?
The October payrolls report is due at 13:30 UTC. CryptoTicker cited economists expecting about 59,000 jobs and an unchanged 4.2 percent unemployment rate, after only 29,000 in September; Bitunix analysts expected about 65,000. A weak figure could raise the odds of rate cuts and help risk assets, or it could read as recession and pull bitcoin down with equities. Holding $75,000 through the expiry and the US open would support the case that bitcoin is decoupling from the AI trade. Losing it would put the 200-day line in view.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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