The recent market sell-off, which sent Bitcoin’s price below $100K and the altcoins tumbling, is suspected to be a well-orchestrated market manipulation. With BTC’s price crashing below the 6-digit figure, around 1 billion was liquidated in the market.
Bitcoin was making lower highs on the weekly chart, closing in on the opening weekly market price of $102K. With the price close to $104K, whales and exchanges saw an opportunity to profit on their holdings. With these institutions and whales dumping all their coins out, the price of BTC crashed from $104K to $97.4K within a day.
The exchanges and the whales together dumped about 1.54 billion dollars in the process. A crypto netizen blamed Binance, BlackRock, and Wintermute for dumping these coins into the open market.
When exchanges sold in billions, there was a whale who sold BTC worth $290 million.
When delving deep into the tactics used in this market manipulation, the first thing to note is the timing of this dump. The Bitcoin supply has been drastically reducing on the exchanges since 2024. However, when the sell-offs happened, supply was at low levels last seen during 2018- nearly $2.3 million, 10% of the total supply of BTC. So what does this whole thing mean?
When large institutions and whales move their holdings from exchanges into cold wallets, cutting the supply, the basic phenomenon is that they are moving their holdings in preparation for a market spike.
However, the market went against the whims and fancies of the traders, liquidating around $966 million in long positions during the past 24 hours. Compared to the massive long liquidation, the short positions liquidated were just a fraction, $127 million. This clearly shows that the masses were looking forward to seeing the market gain value. More than $400 million worth of long positions on Bitcoin were liquidated, making it the largest coin liquidated.
With Bitcoin crashing below the psychological $100K level, the altcoins also crashed. Ethereum crashed from $3,500 to $3,200, XRP dropped by 8% to $2.3, while Solana crashed to $143 from $160.
Dr. Martin Hiesboeck, the head of research at cloud-based financial service platform Uphold, speaking to a prominent crypto media outlet, stated that traders and whales are selling Bitcoins to buy back in the form of ETFs, as it offers tax advantages under current US rules.
In addition, the market has “realized that the real revolution isn’t Bitcoin but Blockchain,” so they are on the hunt to find projects that give higher returns than Bitcoin.
