US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $6.34 billion during the third quarter, their best three months of 2026, and analysts are betting the demand keeps compounding. Citi raised its 12-month bitcoin forecast to $113,000 on October 1, up from $82,000, citing renewed fund buying. The call lands on a price that has done neither what the bulls nor the bears wanted this week.
Bitcoin rose about 43 percent over the quarter, its best run since the first quarter of 2024, and fund assets climbed to roughly $111 billion from $100 billion four weeks earlier, by CoinMarketCap’s count. September alone brought $2.65 billion of net inflows, the second largest monthly total since October 2025, after August’s $3.52 billion. The quarter outpaced everything else on the board: gold rose 8.7 percent over the same three months and major US stock indices about 2 percent, per Coinbird’s tally.
Crypto has risen in six of the eight Octobers since 2018, a seasonal pattern traders like to cite, though October 2025 ended down 3.9 percent with the largest liquidation day in crypto history, when positions worth more than $19 billion were force-closed within 24 hours. The calendar is a weak argument on its own, and this week’s tape proved the point.
Where the inflows actually came from
The story sits in the streaks. The funds added money on nine straight sessions in September, a stretch worth about $3.08 billion, before losing $148.7 million on September 30, per CoinStats. So the month ended with one weak day, not a swing in sentiment, and October opened with another $102.7 million of inflows on October 1. That buying helped push Bitcoin above $86,000 on the morning of October 2, with CoinGlass reporting that more than 91 percent of liquidations in the move were bearish positions forced to close.
The SEC’s September 17 exemptions for tokenized stock platforms added a regulatory tailwind for the broader crypto complex over the quarter, though those rules do not touch ETF holdings directly. Fund demand, not rule changes, did the buying. The Section 27a custody proposal that arrived October 1 will shape what advisers can hold and how, and it does not and did not in this case move the flows on its own.
Then the week went sideways
This week’s price action tells the opposite story. After the softer-than-expected US jobs report on October 2, Bitcoin jumped from $86,000 to $87,220, then failed there and slid below $84,000 within hours. Liquidations passed $570 million in 24 hours and total crypto market cap shed about $80 billion from its peak, according to Cryptopotato. The coin traded near $84,700 on Sunday afternoon, up slightly on the day but well off the week’s high and roughly a third below the near-$126,000 record set in October 2025.
The jobs report itself is the puzzle worth naming. Payrolls grew 29,000 against an expected 90,000, and unemployment rose to 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent. Both prints argue for an easier Fed, which is normally bitcoin fuel. The rally lasted about an hour, then reversed. Whatever institutional money wanted to buy that story had already bought it through ETFs the day before, and leveraged longs did the selling.
Bitfinex analysts put a number on the resistance: about 1.39 million BTC had a cost basis between $84,000 and $86,500 as of September 30, and the team called that band the test for the next leg. Their own gauge of ETF-linked buying sat near the level they associate with sustained rallies, but they wanted the inflows to continue before calling a trend. “The question now is whether spot demand can sustain the move,” the team said in comments to crypto.news.
Citi’s target increase follows the same evidence, arguing that renewed institutional buying supports a price above the current range over 12 months. The bank’s $113,000 figure sits well above Bitcoin’s spot near $85,000 and roughly 10 percent under the October 2025 all-time high. Fear and Greed readings near 69 put sentiment in greed territory without the euphoria of late August, when the index touched 82. Dominance sits near 59 percent, meaning money is concentrated in bitcoin rather than rotating to what analysts call altcoin season.
Macro counts against the trade
The macro picture complicates the flows. The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.34 percent this week, close to two-decade highs, and markets price roughly a 66 percent probability of the Fed holding rates steady in October rather than cutting. Higher yields and a firmer dollar made it harder for Bitcoin to hold breaks above resistance, and CoinStats flagged that combination as the cap on this week’s rally. On-chain, total stablecoin supply on Solana alone reached a record near $17.3 billion in recent days, a sign that cash sitting on the sidelines keeps growing even through the chop.
What to watch next
The question for October is whether fund flows hold through the reversal. Inflows have proven resilient in worse stretches, and ETF assets under management have grown month over month even as spot prices chopped between $82,000 and $87,000. The next test comes from the policy calendar: final MSCI results on its crypto treasury methodology are due by October 16, with changes effective in November. The SEC’s custody proposal and Treasury’s stablecoin rules could pull more institutional money in. Either outcome moves fund demand more than any single price print does.