Bitcoin fell below $86,000 on Monday as trading capital rotated out of the leading cryptocurrency and into select altcoins, with Bitcoin Cash posting the day's most outsized gain.
Bitcoin Cash surged nearly 28% to around $349 over 24 hours, marking the largest move among sizeable tokens, after CME Group said it will list Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures starting Oct. 19. Futures traded on a regulated U.S. exchange allow institutional funds to take positions without directly custodying the underlying coins — a feature that matters for investors whose mandates bar them from holding crypto on balance sheets. The listing also provides a hedging venue for market makers, which typically narrows spot-market price dislocations.
Bitcoin itself traded near $85,800, down just under 1% on the day, after failing to sustain a move above its intraday high of approximately $87,300. Selling pressure emerged at that level, echoing previous rejections.
Other altcoins also advanced: Zcash climbed 9% to roughly $1,646, and XRP rose 3% to nearly $1,59, while TRX declined 2%.
Alex Kuptsikevich, a senior analyst at FxPro, said in an email to CoinDesk that the rally reflected a "temporary shift of speculative capital from the leading cryptocurrency into altcoins" driven by optimism in both the altcoin market and equities. He noted that many investors who had parked cryptocurrency-allocated capital in the most liquid asset — Bitcoin — were now seeking higher returns elsewhere.
Historically, Kuptsikevich observed, such rotations have produced slowdowns rather than reversals in Bitcoin's price, as pullbacks attract new buyers who had previously stayed on the sidelines.
Bitcoin Cash's surge brought the token back to levels not seen since the second half of May, after it reversed near $660 in early January and subsequently fell to $190. A sustained bid could next target the $450 area, where buyers were active between October 2025 and May, the analysis noted.
