Bitcoin retreated to 68,775.99 USDT as election volatility climbed

Bitcoin finished the November 3, 2024 UTC session at 68,775.99 USDT on Binance, down 0.86% from its 69,374.74-USDT opening trade. The decline came as contemporaneous options analysis showed traders assigning greater uncertainty to the market’s reaction to the November 5 U.S. presidential election.

The development mattered because it captured the boundary between two distinct records: bitcoin’s verified retreat before voting concluded and the much larger move derivatives traders believed could follow. The November 3 data did not reveal the election result, establish why every trade occurred or predict which candidate would win.

What the spot record showed

Binance’s BTC/USDT daily candle recorded a high of 69,391.00 USDT and a low of 67,478.73 USDT. Bitcoin therefore moved through a 1,912.27-USDT intraday range, equal to 2.76% of the session’s opening price. Its open-to-close loss was 598.75 USDT. Those percentages and differences are Coinburn calculations from the exchange’s preserved UTC kline.

CoinMarketCap’s November 3 historical snapshot independently placed bitcoin at $68,741.12, with a negative 0.79% change over its displayed 24-hour window. The snapshot reported $34.87 billion in 24-hour volume, a circulating supply of 19,777,353 BTC and a circulating market capitalization of $1.360 trillion.

The Binance close exceeded CoinMarketCap’s snapshot price by $34.87, or approximately 0.05%. That small difference supports the broad price level but does not make the observations identical. Binance measured one BTC/USDT order book at a UTC boundary; CoinMarketCap presented an aggregated USD reference across markets. USDT is a dollar-linked token, not a bank dollar, and cryptocurrency has no consolidated closing auction.

Options reflected a wider range of outcomes

Reporting published on November 3 cited analysis from Derive.xyz founder Nick Forster showing bitcoin forward volatility rising to 80.30% from 72.20%. The same analysis placed ether forward volatility at 82.92%, up from 75.40%.

Forster’s model assigned roughly a two-in-three probability to an election-period bitcoin move between negative 8.97% and positive 9.85%. It described a range of modeled outcomes, not a promise that bitcoin would reach either boundary. The figures were supplied by the protocol’s founder and were not independently reconstructed from a complete options surface for this archive.

Contemporaneous reporting also observed that bitcoin had fallen from approximately $72,600 on October 31 to approximately $67,500 before recovering. That represented a decline of about 7% between the cited high and low. The timing overlapped with changing election expectations, but overlap alone cannot prove that polling or prediction-market prices caused the spot-market move.

What November 3 established

The defensible conclusion is narrow. Bitcoin weakened during the November 3 Binance session, while a derivatives-market analysis indicated that traders expected substantially larger swings around the November 5 election. Spot price and implied volatility measured different things: one recorded completed trades on a particular venue, while the other summarized the price of uncertainty embedded in options.

The record did not establish a universal bitcoin price, a guaranteed post-election direction or a durable change in cryptocurrency regulation. It instead documented a market preparing for a binary political event whose policy consequences remained unresolved on November 3. That distinction is essential when reconstructing the date without importing the election result or subsequent prices into the event-day account.