The Count Is Called, Services Cooled, and the Ledger Patched: Bitcoin Reclaims $80,000 as Friday’s Jobs Print Takes the Stage

By Thursday morning in Vietnam, the week finally had answers instead of previews. The Associated Press has called control of both chambers of Congress for the Democrats. The American services sector cooled a notch in October without losing its footing. And the XRP Ledger’s long-delayed technical patch went live on Wednesday night. Bitcoin, which spent election night dipping to $75,736, answered the pile-up of verdicts by reclaiming $80,000. The question for the rest of the week is narrower now: after a JOLTS beat, a services miss, and a decided election, does Friday’s payrolls report confirm a labor market holding up, or does it hand the December hawks their third argument?

Start with the count, because it is the one verdict that cannot be revised by the next print. As of Thursday morning Vietnam time, the AP had called 223 House seats for Democrats and 138 for Republicans, with 74 districts still to call, but the chamber itself is decided: 218 seats make a majority, and Democrats passed that line on Wednesday. In the Senate, the AP-based tally stands at 54 seats for the Democratic caucus against 44 for Republicans, with Alaska and Mississippi still uncalled. Democrats flipped a net 16 House seats and seven Senate seats from Republicans, according to AP tallies. The headline flips tell the story of the night: Sherrod Brown retook his Ohio Senate seat from Jon Husted in a race the crypto industry spent heavily to influence, James Talarico flipped a Texas Senate seat for Democrats for the first time since 1988, and Troy Jackson unseated Susan Collins in Maine, with further flips in Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

What the result does not do matters as much as what it does. The new Congress is not sworn in until January 3, 2027. Until then, Republicans keep their majorities and President Trump keeps his veto, which means nothing about crypto law changes this week, this month, or in the lame-duck session unless a bill can clear both chambers and a presidential signature. The realistic read, carried across the coverage, is that the CLARITY Act now has one narrow window — a lame-duck deal — before it lapses into a new Congress with different committee chairs. Elizabeth Warren is widely reported as the incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, which would put a longtime crypto skeptic in charge of the panel that writes market-structure law. And whatever the final seat counts, the 60-vote Senate hurdle survives the election intact: a Democratic majority is not a Democratic supermajority, and crypto legislation will still need Republican votes to move. The market’s first reaction got this roughly right. Bitcoin fell as early returns pointed to a Democratic sweep, then recovered as the outcome clarified into something legible — a divided government in transition, not a policy shock.

The second verdict came from the services sector, and it was messier. The ISM Services PMI registered 54.5 percent in October, down 0.4 point from September’s 54.9 and a touch below the 54.7 to 54.8 consensus. It was the second consecutive monthly decline and the slowest expansion in three months, but it was also the 28th straight month above 50, the line between growth and contraction. The details cut both ways, which is why the report did not move the December debate on its own. Business activity fell 2.7 points to 53.8 and new orders dropped 3.9 points to 55.9, the largest decline among the sub-indexes and the softest demand signal in the release. But employment rose 1.3 points to 51.4, its second month in expansion and its strongest since February, and backlogs climbed to 58.0, their highest since July 2022. New export orders swung back to growth at 55.2 after a month of contraction. The price side is where the hawks still have their case: the prices index eased only one point to 73.0, its seventh reading above 70 in eight months, with no commodity reported down in price and fuel up for a ninth straight month. ISM chair Steve Miller noted that tariffs and fuel costs remain the most-cited supply-chain problems, and that many respondents have not yet felt the full cost impact or passed it on to customers. That is the sentence the December hawks will quote. A services sector that is cooling on orders but still paying more for inputs, while hiring, is not a sector handing the Fed a reason to stand pat — it is a sector handing it a reason to wait for Friday.

The jobs bridge between now and Friday got sturdier on Wednesday. ADP’s National Employment Report counted 86,000 private-sector jobs added in October, above the Reuters-polled forecast of 69,000 and the Dow Jones consensus of 75,000, but equal to September’s downwardly revised 86,000 — in other words, flat against the revised September, not an acceleration. Services did nearly all of the hiring at 82,000, led by trade, transportation, and utilities at 39,000, education and health services at 28,000, and leisure and hospitality at 19,000, while professional and business services shed 27,000 for a third straight month. Base pay rose 3.2 percent from a year earlier and gross pay 4.7 percent. Read together with Tuesday’s JOLTS report — 7.523 million openings against a 7.1 million forecast — and the ISM services employment reading of 51.4, the labor picture is consistent: hiring is steady rather than accelerating, quits are picking up, and layoffs remain low. The honest caveat, which Reuters itself carries, is that ADP has been a poor gauge of the official private-payroll estimate. Wednesday’s beat is a signal, not a preview. Friday’s official report, due at 20:30 Vietnam time, is forecast at around 65,000 total nonfarm jobs after September’s 29,000, with unemployment steady at 4.2 percent. That print, not ADP and not ISM, is the week’s deciding number for the December meeting, where markets still price roughly a four-in-five chance of a 25-basis-point hike.

The third verdict arrived quietly, on a ledger rather than in a chamber or a survey. The XRP Ledger’s fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment was enabled on Wednesday at 14:52 UTC, which is 21:52 Vietnam time, at ledger 108,112,129, according to the XRPLWin tracker. The amendment closes a token-permission flaw in which an account holding only the burn permission for an issued token could, under certain conditions, mint new tokens — a hole that mattered most for stablecoins and other issued assets on the ledger. It also bundles fixes for automated market makers, vaults, escrow, and lending calculations. The activation came after a two-week validator reset in October, when support briefly fell to 26 of 35 trusted validators and restarted the 14-day clock; support had recovered to 33 of 35 before the window opened. What the patch does not do is just as important to say plainly: it does not switch on native lending on the XRP Ledger. The separate LendingProtocol amendment sits at 19 votes and SingleAssetVault at 21, both below the 29-vote threshold, and neither moves because a cleanup patch went live. XRP’s own supply is untouched by the change. For XRP holders, the story is a security fix landing on schedule after a delay, not a new feature — and the price action reflected that, with XRP trading near $1.31, up a little over 2 percent on the day, riding the broader market recovery rather than leading it.

That broader recovery is the tape’s own verdict. Bitcoin fell to $75,736 on election night, its weakest level in about seven weeks, then climbed back through $78,000 on Wednesday and pushed above $80,000 by Thursday morning in Vietnam, trading near $80,700 with a 24-hour gain above 4 percent. The V-shape matters because of what it retraced: the election-night dip briefly took out the $76,500 level the market had defended all week, and the recovery reclaimed not just that line but the $80,000 handle that had capped the bounce since the Binance hack selloff. Ether traded near $2,425, up more than 6 percent on the day. The move reads less like a verdict on the election outcome itself — a Democratic Congress was, by Wednesday, the expected one — and more like relief that the outcome is known, the count is called, and the week’s remaining risk is concentrated in one number on Friday. The levels to watch from here are straightforward: the election-night low near $75,736 is the line that must hold for the recovery to mean anything, and $80,000 is now the level to defend rather than the level to chase.

The week in one view

Thursday afternoon belongs to London before it belongs to Washington. The Bank of England decides at 19:00 Vietnam time, with markets expecting a quarter-point hike from 3.75 percent to 4.00 percent, the first increase since 2023, alongside its Monetary Policy Report and a press conference from Governor Bailey at 19:30. The vote split will matter more than the decision itself: September’s hold came 6 to 3, with three members already voting for 4.00 percent. American jobless claims follow at 20:30 Vietnam time, with the prior week at 194,000. Neither event rewrites the week’s story on its own, but a hawkish BoE split landing hours before Friday’s payrolls would reinforce the same message the week’s data has been sending in pieces: growth is holding, prices are not yet beaten, and the burden of proof has shifted to the doves. For the afternoon article, that is the thread to pull — a central bank that spent the year holding is about to hike, on the eve of the print that decides whether the Fed follows in December.

For now, the week has given the market three settled facts and one open question. The count is called, and it points to a slow legislative calendar rather than a fast one. Services are cooling on demand while prices stay hot and hiring firms up. The ledger patch is live, and it is a fix, not a feature. Bitcoin has reclaimed $80,000, but it did so on relief, not on resolution. Friday’s payrolls report at 20:30 Vietnam time is where relief either becomes a trend or gives the gains back. Until then, the smart position is the one the data keeps describing: long the recovery, short the certainty.

For the morning’s JOLTS-led frame and why the vote count could not be called then, see JOLTS Beat Hands the Hawks a Second Argument as Bitcoin Tests $76,500 and the Vote Count Drags On. For the afternoon follow-through on the count, JOLTS, and the night’s watchlist, see Two Verdicts In, Two Due Tonight: The Count Takes Shape, JOLTS Lifts the Hawks, and 21:46 VN Decides Nothing About Lending. For what the midterm outcome means for crypto law once the new Congress sits, see CLARITY Act: Senate Floor Vote, SEC–CFTC Split, and the DeFi Question.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Figures are cited from official releases and market data as reported at the time of writing and are subject to revision. Cryptocurrency markets are volatile; always do your own research before making investment decisions.