Bitcoin fell below $108,000 as August’s retreat deepened

Bitcoin's BTC-USD price fell below $108,000 on Coinbase during August 29, 2025, converting a late-August retreat into a clear break from the record-setting levels reached earlier in the month. Coinbase Exchange's one-day candle, bounded by 00:00 and 24:00 UTC, opened at $112,574.84, traded as low as $107,469.13 and closed at $108,378.32. The close was 3.73% below the open, a Coinburn calculation from those venue records.

The move mattered because it showed how quickly the market's mid-August enthusiasm could unwind even while Bitcoin remained far above its levels from earlier cycles. It also arrived at the intersection of a large derivatives expiry and a closely watched U.S. inflation release. Those facts establish the setting, not a single proven cause.

A venue-specific market record

Coinbase's August 29 candle reached a high of $112,642.53, producing a 4.59% high-to-low span. Reported volume was 7,806.0938333 BTC for the BTC-USD product within that UTC bucket. Coinbase's documentation defines the fields as the first trade, last trade, highest trade, lowest trade and base-asset volume in the interval; it also warns that historical buckets can be incomplete when no ticks occur.

The same Coinbase series recorded a $124,533 high in the August 14 UTC bucket. The August 29 close was therefore 12.97% below that venue-specific peak, another Coinburn calculation. That comparison should not be generalized into a universal all-time-high measurement: crypto trades continuously, exchange prices differ, and a UTC candle does not line up exactly with a U.S. trading session.

Contemporaneous reporting provides a useful cross-check. Forbes reported Bitcoin near $107,500 at about 5 p.m. Eastern on August 29 using Coinbase data displayed through TradingView. That observation corroborates the sub-$108,000 print, while the small difference from Coinbase's UTC low reflects a different timestamp rather than a contradiction.

Inflation and options framed the session

At 8:30 a.m. Eastern on August 29, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released July personal-income and spending estimates. The PCE price index rose 0.2% from June and 2.6% from July 2024. Excluding food and energy, it rose 0.3% month over month and 2.9% year over year. Those were July macroeconomic measurements released on August 29, not August inflation readings.

Derivatives positioning added another event-day reference point. CoinDesk reported on August 26 that Bitcoin and ether options with more than $14.6 billion of combined notional open interest were due to expire on Deribit on August 29. Its snapshot put the Bitcoin portion at $11.62 billion, based on 56,452 call contracts and 48,961 put contracts awaiting expiry. Notional open interest is neither cash changing hands nor trader losses, and a pre-expiry snapshot can change before settlement.

Neither the BEA release nor the options expiry proves why Bitcoin sold off. The price record alone cannot separate inflation reactions, hedging, profit-taking, liquidity conditions or unrelated order flow.

What August 29 established

The defensible conclusion is narrow: on Coinbase's BTC-USD market, Bitcoin fell through $108,000 on August 29 and finished the UTC day down 3.73% from its opening trade. A second publisher using the same underlying venue confirmed a comparable late-session price. The move also occurred on a date carrying identifiable macroeconomic and derivatives events, but available records do not allocate causality among them.

For institutions, that distinction was important. A large notional expiry showed the scale of crypto risk transfer, while the venue-to-venue and clock-bound limits of spot data showed why benchmark choice matters. August 29 supplied evidence of a meaningful market drawdown; it did not establish a new long-term trend or explain, by itself, what came next.