Crypto Before the US CPI Print: What the 10 September PPI Did, What the Liquidation Numbers Actually Are, and What 14:30 CEST Will Answer

Photo: the Postal Square Building in Washington, D.C., home of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics — the agency that published the producer price index on 10 September and publishes the consumer price index today. Photo: AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

This is a dated document. It was written between 05:40 and 06:30 CEST on Friday, 11 September 2026, which is before the US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the August consumer price index at 8:30 ET, 14:30 CEST. Everything below is therefore about what happened on Thursday and what is on the calendar for today. Nothing below says what the CPI will be or what markets will do with it. Our About page explains why we write this way: a market-information desk records, it does not predict.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on 10 September that "The Producer Price Index for final demand moved up 0.4 percent in August, seasonally adjusted". That is the primary figure and the primary source.

The framing of the number was not uniform. Cointelegraph reported the year-on-year print at 5.4 percent, a tenth of a point above expectations, while a CNBC headline the same day described the monthly figure as "as expected". These are two different measures — monthly seasonally adjusted versus annual unadjusted — and both can be true at once. We could not read CNBC's full article, which returned an access error to our tools, so the "as expected" characterisation rests on the headline alone.

The bond market moved. According to Cointelegraph, the US 30-year yield reached 5.353 percent on the day, a level last seen in June 2007. We did not find a primary Treasury figure for the 10-year yield's close and do not quote one.

Three kinds of numbers circulated on Thursday evening, and they should not be mixed.

The first kind is a press snapshot. News.bitcoin.com, publishing at 13:10 EDT, put bitcoin's low at 76,651 dollars and wrote that it had slid more than 2.5 percent in 24 hours, with bitcoin's market capitalisation dipping to 1.55 trillion dollars. Coin-Turk, later in the evening, wrote that "Bitcoin fell by $1,200 to below $77,000". Cointelegraph's page ticker at 14:52 UTC showed bitcoin at 77,110.63 dollars and ether at 2,435.21.

The second kind is our own measurement, taken at about 05:45 CEST on 11 September from the CoinGecko API — some twelve to fourteen hours after the PPI reaction, so a later state, not the same moment. Bitcoin 76,846 dollars, down 1.92 percent over 24 hours; ether 2,445.57, down 1.23 percent; XRP 1.34, down 3.47 percent; solana 99.37, down 2.37 percent; zcash 1,067.84, down 14.16 percent. Total crypto market capitalisation 2,632 billion dollars, down 4.49 percent over 24 hours, with bitcoin at 58.49 percent of it.

The third kind is a widely repeated summary that we could not verify: a total market capitalisation of 2.727 trillion dollars, down 0.9 percent, circulating in aggregator write-ups of Thursday evening. That is not the same as our dawn reading, and the difference is most plausibly time — the market kept falling overnight — but we have no historical minute data to confirm it, so we do not present that figure as fact.

Several outlets quoted CoinGlass for 24-hour liquidations on Thursday, and the figures differ: 190 million dollars in longs within an hour (Coin-Turk), 399 million (a KuCoin flash note whose date we could not pin down), 503 million (PANews at 15:30 UTC, split 432 million long and 70.81 million short, with bitcoin at 115 million and ether at 104 million), and 562 million (news.bitcoin.com, whose own text also contains an inconsistent long/short breakdown).

Read together, these are not four contradictory measurements. They are successive readings of a rolling 24-hour window during a day when the total was rising. The honest way to report Thursday's liquidations is therefore as a range — roughly 190 to 562 million dollars depending on the hour and the outlet — and not as a single figure with a decimal point. We did not query CoinGlass directly.

Spot ETF flows arrive with a one-day lag, which means the most recent complete day is Wednesday, 9 September — before the PPI release. For that day, Farside Investors' table and CoinDesk's live blog agree: US spot bitcoin ETFs saw a net outflow of 120.2 million dollars, "a second consecutive red day" in CoinDesk's words, with IBIT at minus 19.5 million, ARKB at minus 78.0 million and GBTC at minus 27.2 million. Ether ETFs took in 35 million, XRP ETFs 12 million and solana ETFs 12 million. Cumulative net inflows into the bitcoin funds since launch stood at 55.45 billion dollars.

For Tuesday, 8 September, TheCryptoBasic, citing SoSoValue, reported that XRP funds were the only crypto spot ETFs with positive flows, at 1.55 million dollars, while bitcoin ETFs lost 46.65 million. So the pattern "XRP funds in, bitcoin funds out" is documented for two consecutive days before the PPI. Whether it held on the PPI day itself is unknown as we write; Farside's column for 10 September was still empty. Our note of yesterday on the institutional week in numbers covers the flows of the days before that.

The BLS schedule lists "Consumer Price Index — August 2026 — 08:30 AM" for 11 September. FactSet's survey gives a median estimate for headline CPI of 3.3 percent year on year, within a band of 3.30 to 3.50 percent across four estimates, and a median core CPI estimate of 2.4 percent. Those are consensus figures published on 10 September, not results. We will not update this article with the print; the live prices on the Market Observation page will show what happened, with their source and timestamp.

It does not forecast the CPI, the yield or any price. It does not quote a single CoinGlass total as if it were exact. It does not treat an aggregator's evening market-cap figure as verified. And it does not close the gap between Thursday's press snapshots and Friday's dawn reading, because we do not have the minute-by-minute data that would close it. Readers who want the vocabulary — what a rolling liquidation window is, why ETF flows lag — will find it in the Kripto Akadémia; readers who want the longer institutional context can start with the Analyst Room.

That is the record as of 06:30 CEST, 11 September 2026, eight hours before the print.

Sources: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index news release (10 Sept 2026) and release schedule (bls.gov/schedule); Cointelegraph, "Bitcoin falls on US PPI overshoot as 30-year bond yield hits new 19-year high" (10 Sept 2026, 14:52 UTC); CNBC headline on the August PPI (10 Sept 2026, full text not accessible); CoinGecko API, coin markets and global market endpoints (queried 11 Sept 2026, ~05:45 CEST); news.bitcoin.com, "562M liquidation surge hits crypto market after PPI inflation jump" (10 Sept 2026, 13:10 EDT); Coin-Turk (10 Sept 2026); PANews citing CoinGlass (10 Sept 2026, 15:30 UTC); KuCoin flash note (date unconfirmed); Farside Investors bitcoin ETF flow table (read 11 Sept 2026); CoinDesk live ETF blog (10 Sept 2026); TheCryptoBasic citing SoSoValue (9 Sept 2026); FactSet Insight, August 2026 CPI projection (10 Sept 2026). Quotes are reproduced verbatim from the cited pages.

Educational content. Not investment advice.