Here is what is on the record: bitcoin stands at $80,853 on Sunday morning, and the three dates that will act on the price this week fall an hour earlier for you than they did last week. Our
Here is what is on the record: bitcoin stands at $80,853 on Sunday morning, and the three dates that will act on the price this week fall an hour earlier for you than they did last week. Our own assessment follows further down: the shifted hour changes nothing about the direction, but it decides whether you are awake for the moment of the decision or miss it.
The clock change overnight into Sunday applies to Europe only. In Germany the clocks went back from 03:00 to 02:00, as set out in the Central European time zone rules, whose implementation the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt distributes as the legal time. The United States does not switch until November 1. Between today and next Saturday, the gap between Berlin and New York is therefore five hours instead of the usual six.
Bitcoin is quoted at $80,853 on Sunday morning, measured against CoinGecko market data. Over 24 hours that is a gain of 0.06 percent, so the price is barely moving at all. Within those 24 hours, however, $1,686 separated the low at $79,263 from the high at $80,949. The quiet daily close therefore hides a night in which the eighty-thousand mark was briefly undercut.
The all-time high of $126,080 is 35.9 percent away. Market capitalisation stands at around $1.63 trillion. For the week ahead, the absolute figure matters less than the position relative to the moving averages, and that changed on Friday.
On Friday morning the price stood at $80,806. Our own calculation from 366 daily closing prices on October 24 put the 50-day line at $81,807, and in our article from Friday we described how the price had crossed it from above for the first time in 66 days.
Since then the price has moved by $47, or 0.06 percent. The line therefore remains above the price. For the coming trading days, what counts above all is whether the price reclaims it within a few days. If that does not happen by the close of the week, Friday's break was not a slip but the new state of play. The overnight low at $79,263 temporarily widened the distance to the line to $2,544.
Wall Street opens at 9:30 local time in New York. Last week that was 15:30 German time. This week it is 14:30. The close at 16:00 local time correspondingly falls at 21:00 instead of 22:00. The trading hours of the New York Stock Exchange itself do not change, only where they sit in the German calendar.
That sounds like a footnote and is a practical figure for anyone who holds bitcoin alongside equities. The correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq has stayed high in recent weeks, and Friday's setback came in substantial part from the technology sector. Anyone who watches the first minutes after the US open, because that is where the largest share of the daily volume is created, moves that observation point forward by an hour this week. From November 2 the old rhythm applies again.
Rate pause or rate step: Wednesday evening decides which side carries the week.
The Federal Open Market Committee, FOMC for short, meets on October 27 and 28. The body decides on the policy rate and traditionally publishes its statement at 14:00 local time on the East Coast, with the chair's press conference beginning half an hour later. The dates are listed in the Federal Reserve's meeting calendar.
For you, this week, that means the statement arrives on Wednesday at 19:00 German time and the press conference at 19:30. At the previous meeting round in September it was 20:00 and 20:30. Anyone who has aligned an order or a stop level with the minutes after publication should look at that setting now, before Wednesday comes.
On substance, the market expects little movement. The current target range is 3.75 to 4.00 percent, after the FOMC raised by 25 basis points in September. The CME Group's FedWatch tool showed a probability of around 90.6 percent for an unchanged rate on October 22, and around 9.4 percent for a further increase of 25 basis points. Consumer prices stood at 3.7 percent year on year in September, well above the central bank's two percent target.
What an FOMC statement is, in one sentence: the written justification of the rate decision, in which the central bank condenses its reading of prices and the labour market into a few paragraphs. Experience shows that crypto markets react less to the number itself, which is usually expected, than to the wording about the path ahead.
The monthly options on bitcoin expire on Friday, October 30. We put the open interest at $11.1 billion in our article from October 24. The expiry at Deribit, the largest exchange for crypto options, takes place at 08:00 coordinated universal time. This week that is 09:00 German time; last week it would have been 10:00.
The mechanism behind it is worth two sentences, because it is often confused with a price crash. An option is the right to buy or sell bitcoin at a set price, and whoever has sold such rights hedges on the spot market. The closer the expiry comes, the more that hedge has to be readjusted, and it is precisely this readjustment that creates additional buy and sell orders around the strikes with the highest open interest. After the expiry that compulsion falls away, and the price often moves more freely than before.
Friday carries two further dates. It is the last trading day of the month, on which funds square their positions for the monthly accounting. And the CME futures on bitcoin are settled on the last Friday of the month against a reference price fixed at 16:00 London time, which this week means 17:00 German time.
The American spot bitcoin ETFs lost a net $909.7 million in the two weeks to October 16, made up of $681.1 million in the first week and $228.6 million in the second. On October 22 the largest single-day outflow since June was added, $635.6 million, of which $254.1 million came from BlackRock's iShares product and $217.5 million from Fidelity's fund. On October 23 a further $110.3 million flowed out of the BlackRock fund.
Why these figures count for the price and not only for the statistics: an outflow means the fund redeems shares and sells bitcoin to do so. Supply in the market therefore rises by exactly that amount, regardless of what individual investors think. Cumulative net inflows since January 2024 still stand at around $57.3 billion, so the holdings are far from dissolving. But the direction of the past two weeks points down, and it coincides with the break of the 50-day line.
Between Fed Wednesday and expiry Friday sits a date from the network itself. On October 29 the bitcoin network adjusts mining difficulty, estimated 5.55 percent higher. Difficulty is the dial with which the blockchain makes sure, every 2,016 blocks, that a block is found every ten minutes on average, no matter how much computing power is connected.
For investors this is not a trading signal. It is a cost figure for the miners: revenue per kilowatt hour deployed falls by the same percentage as long as the price does not rise with it. With the price 35.9 percent below its high, that increases the pressure on the operators with the most expensive electricity contracts, and historically some of them have sold holdings in such phases.
You document the purchase date for the holding period yourself; no exchange does it for you.
For investors in Germany, cryptocurrencies held as private assets fall under the one-year holding period set out in section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Anyone who holds for longer than twelve months sells tax free; anyone who sells earlier pays tax on the gain at their personal rate, provided they exceed the threshold of 1,000 euros in the calendar year. We track the current state of the political debate about this period on our page on the crypto holding period.
The clock change touches this period at one point that almost nobody thinks about. Your purchase record carries a time stamp, and depending on the exchange it shows coordinated universal time, the provider's local time or your own. A purchase on October 25, 2026 at 00:30 German time is still October 24 in coordinated universal time. On a sale close to the anniversary, that difference decides whether you stand on the safe side of the deadline.
The practical consequence is simple and costs you five minutes: download your purchase record as a file instead of relying on the view in the app, and note next to it which time zone the stamp uses. Anyone who wants to do this continuously, without keeping it by hand, will find the right tools in our comparison of crypto tax software. These tools pull the transactions through an interface and convert the time stamps into German time.
Many savings plans on bitcoin are executed on the last day of the month or on the first business day of the following month. This month the last trading day falls on the same Friday as the options expiry and the funds' monthly accounting. That is no reason to pause a savings plan, because the whole point of one lies precisely in not choosing the moment.
It is a reason to know two things. First the execution time: if it falls in the morning, this week it sits after the Deribit expiry at 09:00 and therefore in a phase in which the spread between bid and ask is, experience shows, wider. Second the fee structure of your provider, because with small instalments a fixed minimum fee counts for proportionally more than any price move of the day. Anyone who wants to compare both will find the terms in our overview of crypto exchanges.
From the editorial desk, the shifted hour is a question of scheduling and not a question of price. The data supports that: the rate decision will with around 90 percent probability bring no change, and an expected decision rarely moves a market. Nothing in the price data argues against it either, because the 24-hour change of 0.06 percent shows a market that is not positioning itself.
What can actually decide the week are two other figures. The 50-day line at $81,807 sits $954 above the current price; reclaiming it would be the first reliable sign that Friday was a slip. And the ETF outflows of $909.7 million in two weeks are the quantity that brings supply to the market independently of any central bank meeting. If they do not turn, even a friendly press conference on Wednesday evening will help for only a few hours. This assessment weighs up the situation and is not a recommendation to buy or sell.
(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
