Inflation Came in Hot, Bitcoin Lost $73,000, and a December Hike Is Now the Bet

The day in one breath: Tuesday was the test this market had circled for a week, and it failed it in both directions at once. Inflation printed hot, Bitcoin broke below $73,000 for the first time since August, and the day's biggest corporate money story ran the same way as the flows: MARA sold $1.1 billion of bitcoin in six weeks and says it will sell more, while Zcash dropped 10% in a leveraged washout on the very day Grayscale launched an ad campaign for it.

Context: BTC closed $73,721 (−2.1%) on Nov 10 (CoinGecko daily close) — Fear & Greed 32 (Fear).

#1 — Inflation came in hot, bitcoin lost $73,000, and a December hike is now the bet

What happened: The Bureau of Labor Statistics put October consumer prices up 0.4% on the month — down from September's 0.6%, but above the 0.3% economists polled by Dow Jones had forecast. Core prices, stripping out food and energy, rose 0.3% against a 0.2% forecast, core's third straight month at +0.3%. Shelter accounted for over 30% of the monthly increase, with food up 0.5% and energy up 0.7%. There was no year-over-year rate to argue about: the BLS never collected October 2025 prices during last year's government shutdown, so no annual comparison exists. The print landed on a market already leaning hawkish — Fed Governor Christopher Waller had said overnight that he favored a December increase even if inflation cooled, and that a hot reading could warrant 50 basis points. Bitcoin was near $74,264 before the 8:30 AM ET release and $73,494 within five minutes; about $178 million of leveraged longs were liquidated in the first hour and about $360 million over 24 hours. By late morning CoinDesk had bitcoin through $73,000 for the first time since August — its weakest level since August 20 and a new low for the current slide — with an intraday low near $72,836 before a partial recovery to a $73,721 UTC-day close, down 2.1%. The damage widened down the board: Ethereum closed at $2,050 (−3.8%) and Solana at $83.27 (−3.8%), and CoinDesk's mid-morning snapshot had ether, XRP and Solana each down close to 6% at the worst of it. Bonds voted loudest: the 2-year Treasury yield jumped 14 basis points to 4.69% on the print and ended the day up about 21 basis points near 4.76%, while the 10-year pushed through 5%. CME FedWatch put the December 9 meeting at 85% for a quarter-point hike and 15% for a half-point — the hold outcome traders had priced at over 30% a week earlier was gone. The fund bid offered no cushion: US spot bitcoin ETFs lost another $95.0 million on Tuesday, a fourth straight outflow day led by BlackRock's IBIT at −$78.2 million, taking the complex to roughly $1.2 billion negative for the year; spot ether ETFs lost $2.0 million.

Why it matters: Follow the repricing, because that is the story. A week ago this market was debating whether the Fed would move at all in December; by Tuesday afternoon the only question was whether it hikes 25 or 50, decided by an inflation report that does not even carry an annual rate. Bitcoin is an energy-backed currency in its supply design, but on print days it trades as what its order books say it is — the most liquid risk asset in the world — and right now every marginal flow points the same way: the ETF complex is net negative for the year, miners are guided sellers (tonight's second story), and the support level analysts flagged before the print, $73,000, broke intraday on the first test. The close back above it is the only softener in the tape. What comes next is scheduled, not speculative: producer prices on Friday, November 13, are the last inflation read before the December 9 meeting, and a second hot print turns the 15% half-point tail into the base case.

Source: BLS October CPI via CoinDesk live coverage — Bitcoin falls to nearly three-month low after disappointing inflation data (Nov 10; headline +0.4%, core +0.3%, no year-over-year rate, Waller comments, FedWatch 85%/15%, the break below $73,000, yield moves); pre-print price and five-minute drop via PlainBTC and TradingView/Invezz coverage of CoinDesk's live blog (Nov 10); first-hour and 24-hour liquidation totals via JournalArta (Nov 10; about $200M in the first hour, about $360M over 24 hours) and BeInCrypto (Nov 10, 13:39 UTC); Tuesday ETF flows — Farside figures via the Alpha Finance ETF tracker (BTC −$95.0M, IBIT −$78.2M, ETH −$2.0M, complete Nov 10 session); BTC/ETH/SOL UTC-day closes — CoinGecko daily closes.

#2 — MARA sold $1.1 billion of bitcoin in six weeks — and says it will sell more

What happened: MARA Holdings used its third-quarter shareholder letter, filed Monday and reported Tuesday, to disclose the largest miner treasury sale of the year. After September 30 the company sold 13,597 BTC at an average of about $81,039 — roughly $1.1 billion in about six weeks. That is 40% of the 34,012 BTC it held at quarter-end, and about six times the 2,247 BTC it mined during the entire third quarter. Of the proceeds, $750 million repaid every bitcoin-backed term loan in full — debt drawn in August to help fund the planned purchase of Long Ridge, a natural-gas power business — and the repayment released 17,477 BTC that had been pledged as collateral, cutting the share of MARA's holdings lent out or pledged to under 5% from 57% at quarter-end. The business behind the sale is shrinking: third-quarter revenue fell 35% year over year to $164.2 million, and the company has cut total debt by $1.4 billion, 37%, this year. The letter is explicit that the selling is not finished: MARA says it intends to keep using bitcoin to build cash for AI infrastructure opportunities, for the puts on its convertible notes that become exercisable next year, and for potential share repurchases — the board has authorized a buyback of up to $500 million — while management works to sign two AI/HPC data-center leases by year-end, a timeline that may slip into 2027. MARA is the biggest name in a wider pattern: Lookonchain counts 14 public companies selling a combined 108,247 BTC, about $8.08 billion, in 2026, with MARA alone at 40,581 BTC and Riot Platforms at 20,264 BTC — the two miners together are about 56% of all corporate selling.

Why it matters: This is the 2024 playbook running in reverse. MARA pledged that year to retain every coin it mined; two years later its treasury is an ATM, and the letter tells you the order the cash leaves in — lenders first ($750 million), then the AI pivot, then shareholders. The sale itself was well timed for MARA: $81,039 a coin is roughly $7,300 above Tuesday's close. For the market, though, the number that matters is not the $1.1 billion that already left — it is that the exit is guided, not done, and it is industry-wide: 108,247 BTC sold by listed companies this year is real supply arriving in the same year the ETF complex flipped net negative. The corporate bid was half the bull case for this cycle. Tuesday's filing is what the other half of that trade looks like: when mining revenue falls 35%, the stack gets spent.

Source: CoinDesk — Bitcoin miner MARA sold 13,597 BTC for $1.1 billion in six weeks, plans to sell more (Nov 10, 12:18 AM EST, updated 12:53 AM EST; sale size, $81,039 average, $750M loan repayment, collateral release, revenue −35%, 2024 pledge reversal); Bitcoin Magazine — MARA Sells 13,597 Bitcoin For $1.1B, Repays BTC-Backed Loans (Nov 10; Q3 shareholder letter quotes, $500M buyback authorization, under-5% pledged figure); 14-company 2026 selling total — Lookonchain via CoinDesk live coverage (Nov 10; 108,247 BTC, MARA 40,581 BTC, Riot 20,264 BTC); MARA's disclosure also carried in CoinDesk Daybook (Nov 10, 7:15 AM EST).

#3 — Zcash fell 10% on no bad news. The longs were the news.

What happened: Zcash had the worst day of any top-15 coin, and there was no Zcash news bad enough to explain it — which is itself the finding. ZEC closed the UTC day at $1,044, down 10.2% from Monday's $1,162 close, after trading as low as $999.57 intraday. The break came in the afternoon: TokenPost's exchange snapshots show ZEC down 7.9% in a single 30-minute window to $1,092 around 15:42 UTC, and liquidation tallies across Binance, Bybit, OKX, Hyperliquid and Bitget reached about $27.08 million, with 89.1% of it long positions getting forced out; the largest single liquidation event, about $13.12 million, hit around 16:00 UTC. On OKX, Zcash open interest fell from about $162 million to about $130 million in under two hours as the longs unwound, and tracking of Hyperliquid whale accounts showed 22 of 28 ZEC long positions over $1 million sitting on a combined $10.89 million of unrealized losses. Coverage that went looking for a cause — CryptoTicker and the day's news roundups — found no hack, no delisting, no outage. The setup was leverage built on a headline: ZEC had risen about 9% after the NU7 upgrade activated on November 6 (block 3,543,405; the upgrade cut the target block interval from 75 to 25 seconds without changing the 21 million cap or issuance), and Tuesday's macro selloff met that crowded long book. The day's actual Zcash headline ran the other way: Grayscale announced a $1 million pledge to Zcash ecosystem nonprofits — $400,000 of it already out to four organizations — plus a Zcash Invest education platform and a national ad campaign, "Zcash: The Next Era of Crypto," including Wall Street Journal placements. Its ZCSH fund, the first US exchange-traded product holding ZEC directly, held about $675.7 million of assets on November 9 — but has recorded over $15 million of net outflows so far in November. ZEC is down about 19% over 30 days and still up about 75% over the year.

Why it matters: Separate the two questions. Did anything about Zcash break? No — the protocol just shipped its upgrade, the shielded share of supply sat near 29% last week, and the day's only fundamental headline was a sponsor spending money on the ecosystem. Did the trade break? Completely: a 10% down day with $27 million of liquidations, nine-tenths of them longs, is a positioning accident, and it tells you how much of the post-NU7 price was borrowed money rather than buyers. The Grayscale detail deserves the BogusAPY test too. The $1 million pledge is real money for nonprofits, but read where it comes from: Grayscale has said it will reinvest 100% of ZCSH's 2.5% annual sponsor fee into the ecosystem in the fund's first year — the campaign is funded out of what holders pay, and it is marketing-scale next to a $675 million fund. If the ads work, ZCSH's outflows slow and the fee pool that funds the ecosystem holds up. If they don't, both shrink together. The flow number, not the ad buy, is the one to watch.

Source: ZEC UTC-day close $1,044 (−10.2%) and intraday low — CoinGecko daily data; afternoon cascade snapshots — TokenPost (Nov 10, 15:37 and 15:42 UTC); liquidation totals, long share and largest single event — exchange data compiled in CoinStats' Zcash news roundup (Nov 10–11); OKX open-interest drop and NU7 mechanics — CryptoTicker via ad-hoc-news (Nov 10, 18:40 CET); Hyperliquid whale losses — HuoXing Finance via KuCoin News (Nov 10, 04:15 UTC); Grayscale $1M pledge, $400K disbursed, Zcash Invest, ad campaign, ZCSH assets and November outflows, 2.5% sponsor-fee reinvestment — Crypto Briefing (Nov 10) with ZEC price context via Decrypt.

Most-searched today

Prices are CoinGecko rolling 24h at check time (early Nov 11 UTC), which differ from the UTC-day closes used above.

• INIT — Initia — $0.2368 (+7.2%): The catalyst is dated, sourced, and bad — the searches are chasing a paradox. Initia halted its layer-1 at 06:18 UTC on November 10, its second security halt in under three weeks, after attackers used compromised rollup infrastructure keys to forge IBC transfers and drain about $605,000 of USDC plus about $10,000 of other tokens out through Noble (Initia's preliminary count; CertiK counted about $636,000 across 16 transfers; SlowMist logs $615,000). The October 23 incident that preceded it took about $2.7 million through a MoveVM exploit and kept the chain down until November 2. And the token went up: crypto.news put INIT up 61.31% over 24 hours around the halt on about $84.8 million of volume, with spot volume up roughly 1,400%, contract volume near $883 million and a weighted funding rate of −1.8253% — shorts were crowded and paying, which is the mechanical signature of a squeeze, not of buyers endorsing the news. BogusAPY score read: INIT is the native token of a chain that has now been stopped twice by compromised keys in 18 days. A token rising while its chain is halted is pricing positioning, not security — the key-management failure is the fact that outlives the candle.
• HYPE — Hyperliquid — $71.59 (−4.0%): A real, dated November 10 catalyst: South Korea's two largest exchanges listed HYPE the same afternoon — Upbit opened KRW, BTC and USDT markets at 15:00 Korea time (06:00 UTC), with deposits and withdrawals over HyperEVM only and the usual first-hours order restrictions, and Bithumb followed at 16:00 KST with a KRW pair. It landed one day after Kinetiq's Elysium, the first Hyperliquid layer-2, went live with HYPE as its gas token. The listings did not produce a rally: HYPE closed the UTC day at $72.21, down 3.9%, carried lower by the CPI selloff like everything else on the board. BogusAPY score read: HYPE's claim on value was never the listings — it is Hyperliquid's fee machine, with the Assistance Fund's buybacks put at about $67.9 million over the 30 days to November 10. A Korean listing adds a doorway; it does not add a dollar of fees. The buyback pace is the number that decides whether the token captures the exchange's growth.
• JCT — Janction — $0.00813 (+25.4%): Catalyst check: no fresh fundamental catalyst — attention, positioning, and a dated supply event arriving on schedule. Trackers schedule a JCT unlock for November 10, but they disagree by two orders of magnitude: Tokenomics.com and DropsTab list about 1.18 billion JCT (about 11% of the roughly 10.3 billion circulating, 2.35% of the 50 billion maximum supply), ChainCatcher/RootData size the day's release at about 12.3 million, and one tracker puts the first cliff on December 10 instead — the size and even the date are unconfirmed against an official schedule. The searches follow a parabolic week: snapshots caught JCT up 225% to 363% in 24 hours around November 8–9, to an all-time high near $0.019, before it gave back more than half the move within hours on November 9; the project's own dated posts are product updates (the JANCTION Render GPU service launched November 2), and coverage of the spike found no announcement behind it. BogusAPY score read: JCT is a token for a JasmyLab GPU-compute marketplace with thin public usage data, and roughly 89% of its maximum supply is still locked. For this token the unlock calendar is the math — and right now the calendar itself cannot be verified to within two orders of magnitude.

Source: trending list and prices — CoinGecko, checked Nov 11, 2026; INIT — Initia's Nov 10 announcement via crypto.news (halt at 06:18 UTC, compromised rollup keys, $615K SlowMist total, +61.31% 24h snapshot, $84.8M volume) and ChainThink via KuCoin News (Nov 10, 08:01 UTC; funding −1.8253%, about $2.56M liquidated, $605K USDC figure); HYPE — Crypto Briefing (Nov 10, 05:27 UTC; Upbit and Bithumb listings) and CoinStats' Hyperliquid roundup (listing times, $67.9M 30-day buyback figure via Strata Terminal, Nov 6 HYPE ETF outflows); JCT — CoinEdition (Nov 9; +225% snapshot, 1.18B unlock schedule, no announcement behind the spike) and AInvest (Nov 8; ~363% snapshot, ~11% unlock sizing, multisig-held locked supply), with the 12.3M figure per ChainCatcher/RootData as compiled in VaultX's JCT profile (checked Nov 8).

Oversold corner

Universe: 50 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap (CoinGecko), excluding stablecoins and wrapped/pegged tokens; 14-day RSI from daily closes, checked early Nov 11 UTC. Prices are rolling 24h at check time.

• SOL — $82.54 (−4.0%) — RSI 22.7
• XRP — $1.055 (−4.1%) — RSI 23.5
• XLM — $0.144 (−2.9%) — RSI 25.1
• OKB — $96.04 (−0.6%) — RSI 26.0
• RAIN — $0.00422 (−7.2%) — RSI 26.1

Tomorrow: MSCI publishes its final index list on November 11 — Strategy, Metaplanet and the Solana treasury Upexi were flagged for proposed deletion under the new treasury-company rules, with any changes effective after the November 30 close — and US producer prices (PPI) follow on Friday, November 13.

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Sources checked Nov 11, 2026, covering the Nov 10 UTC day (BTC/ETH/SOL/ZEC/HYPE UTC-day closes, trending list and RSI screener: CoinGecko — daily closes are CoinGecko's midnight-UTC marks; Fear & Greed: alternative.me — Nov 10 reading 32, Fear; CPI: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' October release as reported in CoinDesk's Nov 10 live coverage — the +0.4%/+0.3% prints, the missing year-over-year rate and the shelter/food/energy split are the BLS's, the Dow Jones consensus is CoinDesk's; liquidation totals differ by window and venue — about $178M of longs in the first hour (TokenPost figures carried in Nov 10 coverage) and about $360M over 24 hours (JournalArta) are reported as such, not blended; ETF flows: Farside Investors figures via the Alpha Finance tracker — its early partial snapshot for Nov 10 (−$16.8M) was superseded by the complete session (−$95.0M) once IBIT's late report landed, and only the complete figure is used; the roughly −$1.2B year-to-date tally is the prior −$914M (SoSoValue via CoinDesk) plus Monday's −$201M and Tuesday's −$95M; MARA: the company's Q3 shareholder letter as reported by CoinDesk and Bitcoin Magazine — the 108,247 BTC corporate-selling total is Lookonchain's count via CoinDesk, not a filing; Zcash: liquidation and open-interest figures are exchange-data compilations (CoinStats roundup, CryptoTicker, TokenPost snapshots) and are estimates, while the Grayscale pledge terms are Crypto Briefing's report of the company's announcement; MSCI timing per MSCI's October rule announcement as carried by Weex News. Not financial advice.