Bitcoin Rebounds Above $83K as Chip Selloff Liquidates $800M

A rough Tuesday for risk assets

On October 13, 2026, another wave of selling hit semiconductor stocks around the world, and crypto markets took the first blow. Bitcoin briefly dropped below $81,000 in early trading. By the U.S. afternoon it had climbed back above $83,000 while chipmakers and parts of Wall Street were still struggling. 12

The selloff started in Asia. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each fell about 8%, their fifth straight losing session. 2 South Korea's KOSPI dropped 5.5% during Asian trading and now sits roughly 38% below its June all-time high. 4 The losses in the Korean memory giants pulled a broader Asian equity benchmark to its lowest level since August. Nasdaq 100 futures slipped 0.8% and S&P 500 contracts fell 0.1%. 5 Europe went the other way: the Stoxx 600 gained 0.3% as falling oil prices and bond yields helped economically sensitive shares. 5

What's driving the chip rout

Coverage of the day agrees on two main worries: whether AI spending is sustainable, and competition from Chinese chipmakers. 124 CoinDesk named two specific triggers. One was Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's warning about speculative AI investment. The other was CXMT's claim of a breakthrough in memory chips, a direct threat to the Korean firms that dominate that market. 4 In the U.S., Nvidia and other chipmakers also came under pressure. 1

Bank earnings added to the uncertainty. JPMorgan Chase missed expectations, while Goldman Sachs reported a very strong trading quarter, leaving Wall Street without a clear direction. 1 Traders are also looking ahead to Thursday's U.S. CPI report, which adds a macro risk on top of the earnings season. 2

$800 million in forced selling

In crypto, the early drop set off a classic leverage flush. Exchanges liquidated about $803 million in leveraged positions over 24 hours, and 86% of that came from bullish bets. 3 Once bitcoin recovered, the pattern reversed. About $74 million was liquidated over the next four hours, and 79% of it came from short positions. 3 In short, longs were hit on the way down and shorts on the way back up.

The more unusual detail is what was being liquidated. Perpetual futures tied to SanDisk recorded $19.09 million in liquidations, more than XRP, one of crypto's largest tokens. 3 This shows that crypto venues are no longer used only for digital assets. Traders are increasingly using them to place leveraged bets on equities, especially volatile semiconductor names. That changes how stock-market stress reaches crypto. A selloff in memory chips can now cause forced liquidations on the same exchanges where bitcoin trades, so the link between the two runs partly through shared plumbing and not only through general risk sentiment.

The decoupling argument

Several headlines described bitcoin as "decoupling" from the chip rout. 24 The longer-term numbers give that claim some support. Bitcoin bottomed near $58,000 around the time the KOSPI peaked and has since rallied as high as $87,000, a recovery of roughly 40%. Over the same period, the Korean index lost more than a third of its value. 4 CoinDesk cites a rolling correlation of -0.41 between the two, a moderately negative relationship. Its own description of the measurement window is inconsistent, calling it both a 20-week and a 20-day period. 4 The outlet suggests bitcoin could gain as investors pull money out of stretched AI-linked stocks. 4

The intraday reports also differ slightly on prices. Bitcoin.com variously put bitcoin at about $83,164 and $83,445 in the afternoon. 1 A CoinDesk price snapshot taken earlier in the session showed it near $81,000, down almost 3%, with ether, XRP and solana each down 4% to 6%. 2 These gaps reflect a fast-moving market rather than any real disagreement about what happened.

Reading the day

The decoupling story deserves some caution. On Tuesday, bitcoin did not ignore the chip selloff. It fell along with Asian tech, triggered hundreds of millions of dollars in long liquidations, and only then recovered. 23 What stands out is how quickly it recovered compared with equities, not that it was immune. A negative correlation over several months says more about where investors have been moving money since June than about how bitcoin will behave in a sudden shock.

The bigger structural point is the SanDisk liquidation data. If crypto exchanges are becoming a popular venue for leveraged stock bets, future semiconductor routs could cause more crypto volatility, even if bitcoin's longer-term trend keeps diverging from Korean chip stocks. With CPI due Thursday and bank earnings still coming in, the next few sessions will test whether bitcoin can hold above $83,000. 12