Bitcoin traded below $84,000 on Oct. 7 as US Treasury yields near 5.3% offered investors a competing interest-bearing alternative. Higher yields can raise the return investors expect to justify speculative crypto exposure.

The historical relationship is less straightforward. CryptoSlate's comparison of 2,435 matched daily changes since January 2017 found weak linear relationships between Bitcoin returns, nominal and real Treasury yield changes, and dollar-index returns. The daily relationships also remained weak in the post-ETF trading period.

The US ten-year nominal par yield was 5.27% on Oct. 6, down from 5.31% a day earlier. Bitcoin's market price was about $83,086 at 14:25 UTC on Oct. 7. The Oct. 5 nominal yield was the highest observation in the daily series examined, which begins in January 2017.

Bitcoin nevertheless gained 84.2% from January 10, 2024, the day before US spot Bitcoin ETF trading began, through Oct. 5, 2026. Over that period, the ten-year nominal yield rose 127 basis points and the real yield rose 113 basis points. This measures Bitcoin's price performance and shows that rising yields and a rising Bitcoin price can coexist; it establishes no ETF-driven explanation for the gain.

The inflation-adjusted alternative has strengthened too. Treasury's ten-year real par yield stood at 2.91% on Oct. 6, down from 2.95% the previous day. The Oct. 5 reading was also the highest in the daily series examined since January 2017.

Those levels describe the reward available from a competing interest-bearing alternative. They can make speculative exposure harder to justify, but they do not establish that a yield increase caused Bitcoin's latest decline.

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