分类： Bitcoin

When Bitcoin falls, most people see a shrinking number on a screen. The committed bull sees an opportunity to stack more sats for the next run quietly.

Bear markets feel brutal in real time. Timelines fill with capitulation, “Bitcoin is dead” posts resurface, and the same people who were breathless at the top sound bored again.

Yet historically, this is where disciplined bulls have done their best work, increasing their Bitcoin holdings while everyone else fights fatigue.

You do not need a quant’s toolkit to do it. With a simple framework and a few basic strategies, a long-term Bitcoin believer can use downturns to emerge with more BTC than they had at the peak, ready for whatever comes next.

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Step one, decide what you are actually trying to grow

Before touching any strategy, a Bitcoin bull has to answer a simple question. Is the goal to grow the dollar value of their portfolio, or the number of BTC in their stack?

In a falling market, those goals pull in different directions.

A trader who thinks in dollars is tempted to sell early, buy back lower, and report a profit in fiat terms, even if they end up with less Bitcoin than they started with.

A bull who thinks in BTC is playing a different game. They want more coins by the time the next cycle tops out, even if the mark-to-market value looks ugly along the way.

Every tactic below makes more sense when viewed through that lens. The metric that matters is the size of the stack, not the daily P&L screenshot.

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Dollar cost averaging on the way down, with rules, not vibes

Dollar cost averaging, DCA, is the most boring tool in the kit, and also the most underrated in a falling market.

The concept is simple. You decide in advance to buy a fixed amount of Bitcoin at regular intervals, for example every week or every month, regardless of price. Instead of trying to guess the bottom, you let time do the work, smoothing out your entry as the market grinds lower.

Where it becomes powerful for a committed bull is when it is combined with a written plan. That plan might look like:

• A fixed percentage of income or cash flow allocated to Bitcoin each month
• Pre defined buy dates, for example the first and the fifteenth
• An extra “dip fund” that only triggers if price falls below specific levels that you set in advance

The rules matter. In a deep drawdown, emotions scream to “wait a little longer, it will be cheaper tomorrow.” That tendency is exactly how people miss the most attractive prices of the cycle. A standing order is boring, but it executes when your future self will be glad you acted.

For BTC stack growth, DCA works as the foundation. The rest of the strategies sit on top of it.

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Small, simple hedges, making volatility work for you

Shorting is a dirty word for many Bitcoin bulls, yet a small and carefully sized hedge can protect your stack and even help you accumulate more BTC when the market steps down.

You do not need 10x leverage and a day trader’s screen to do this. One approach is to treat hedging like an insurance policy. Bulls often allocate a tiny slice of BTC holdings or capital to a short position during periods when the market looks stretched and overheated, for example, after a parabolic move and euphoric sentiment.

The logic is straightforward. If the price falls sharply, that short generates profit. Instead of withdrawing those gains as cash, a Bitcoin bull can rotate them into more BTC at the new, lower levels. If the market shrugs off the pullback and continues higher, the small hedge expires at a loss, and the central long-term holdings benefit from the trend.

The crucial word is “small”. Overhedging is how long-term bulls accidentally convert themselves into net bears. The intention here is not to bet against Bitcoin; it is to keep some dry powder that reacts well to sharp down moves, then recycle that into your long holdings.

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Grid trading, turning choppy markets into extra sats

In choppy markets, conviction often dies. Price ping pongs in a range, social feeds grow quiet, and nobody is quite sure whether the next move will be a breakdown or a breakout.

For a Bitcoin bull who is comfortable leaving a portion of their stack to work on a clear set of rules, grid trading can turn that dull volatility into extra coins.

The idea is to place a series of staggered buy and sell orders at preset price levels within a range. For example, imagine BTC trading between 45k and 30k. A bull might:

• Place buy orders every 2k lower on the way down, paid with stablecoins
• Place sell orders every 2k higher on the way up, taking profit back into stablecoins or into BTC held at a different wallet

When price oscillates inside that band, the grid automatically buys low and sells high, generating small, repeated gains. Those gains can then be consolidated into additional long-term Bitcoin holdings.

Modern exchanges and some bots offer simple grid tools so users do not have to manually place each order, although that convenience comes with counterparty risk. As always, a bull who cares about stack survival keeps the majority of holdings in cold storage and only allocates a defined, smaller portion to active strategies.

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Using options as a shield, not a lottery ticket

Options are usually marketed as lottery tickets on crypto Twitter, but they can also serve a quieter role for a Bitcoin bull who wants protection without panic-selling.

One example is buying put options during periods of elevated uncertainty. A put option gives you the right, not the obligation, to sell BTC at a specific price within a certain timeframe. The premium you pay is similar to an insurance fee. If the market crashes, those puts increase in value, generating profit that can be recycled into fresh Bitcoin at lower prices.

There are more advanced variations, such as selling covered calls on a portion of your stack. In that case, you collect option premiums in exchange for agreeing to sell some BTC if the price reaches a specific level in the future. Used carefully, those premiums can grow holdings in quiet periods, although bulls accept the risk of having to part with that portion of their stack if the market explodes higher.

Again, sizing and intent matter more than complexity. A long-term bull is not trying to build a derivatives hedge fund. The role of options in this framework is to provide modest protection and occasional yield that flows back into core holdings.

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Yield and lending, with a very bright line around risk

Every bear market in crypto has come with its own yield story and its own set of blow-ups. From offshore lending desks to overleveraged trading firms, the lesson has been consistent. Counterparty risk can wipe out years of careful stacking in a single black swan.

That does not mean every source of yield is off limits forever. It does mean a Bitcoin bull who wants to survive several cycles treats yield like a bonus, not a baseline.

A conservative framework might look like this:

• Keep the majority of BTC in self-custody, untouchable and offline
• Allocate a small, clearly defined portion to lower-risk yield strategies, for example, on regulated venues with transparent reserves.
• Treat all yield as temporary and reversible, with a plan to pull funds when market conditions deteriorate.

The yield generated can be used to buy more spot Bitcoin on a schedule, or to fund the other hedging strategies described above. The aim is always the same. Grow the stack while surviving the occasional failure in the broader crypto credit system.

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A written methodology for the next cycle

None of these strategies requires expert-level trading skills. What they do require is intentionality. The Bitcoin bull who comes out of a bear market with a larger stack usually has three things in place:

1. A clear primary goal, more BTC, not just more dollars on a screen
2. A base layer of automatic accumulation through DCA
3. A small set of simple, well-defined tactics to exploit volatility and protect the downside

Bear markets eventually exhaust themselves. Sentiment bottoms out, forced sellers disappear, and the same asset everyone wrote off at the lows begins to climb again.

When that next phase arrives, the question for a believer in Bitcoin is simple. Did the downtrend shrink your stack, or did you quietly accumulate more, ready for the moment the market remembers why it cared in the first place?

Are we in a Bitcoin bear market?

Bitcoin’s price action right now resembles a slow descent down a liquidity staircase.

Each shelf, $112k, $100k, then $90k, and then the high $80ks, has behaved like a rung on a ladder, catching price briefly before giving way.

The market now sits inside a broad purple band in the low $90,000s, a zone where trapped longs are exiting and fresh shorts are leaning.

If selling pressure resumes, the next meaningful cluster of historical bids, market-maker inventory, and ETF-era liquidity sits near $85,000. It’s not a prophecy; it’s simply the next step on the grid Bitcoin has respected for more than a year.

For bulls, this directional map matters because it reframes fear into structure. If the path toward deeper shelves remains clean, the market may offer a series of increasingly attractive long-term accumulation points.

Whether price bounces early or tags the lower bands, these areas tend to be where volatility compresses, emotions peak, and disciplined BTC-denominated thinkers quietly expand their stack.

In other words, directionality is not about timing the bottom; it’s about knowing where opportunity tends to concentrate when everyone else is exhausted.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Crypto markets are volatile; always conduct your own research and consult with a professional before making financial decisions.

Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed asked the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to investigate World Liberty Financial after a watchdog alleged that WLFI token sales touched wallets tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, a Russia-linked ruble token, an Iranian exchange, and prior Tornado Cash users.

The senators’ referral arrived after Accountable US published wallet-level claims in September, naming specific interactions and timelines for dozens of buyers across those categories.

WLFI’s own pages state that Trump-affiliated DT Marks DeFi LLC and certain family members hold 22.5 billion WLFI and receive 75% of net token-sale proceeds through a services agreement. According to World Liberty Financial, that structure is part of the project’s economic model and disclosures.

The concentration of both token holdings and sale economics now sits at the center of the senators’ request because any sanctions exposure could route directly into entities tied to former President Donald Trump’s business network.

Emerging sanctions risks sharpen scrutiny of WLFI’s buyer activity and controls

The watchdog’s September report asserted that one buyer interacted with a Lazarus-associated wallet, another was active on Iran’s Nobitex exchange, some activity involved an A7A5 ruble-backed token, and 62 buyers also used Tornado Cash at some point. According to Accountable US, those associations map across presale and early sale periods.

WLFI has publicly stated that it vets buyers through KYC and AML screening, a claim that, if accurate, will focus Treasury’s review on control effectiveness rather than on policy presence, since OFAC applies a strict-liability standard to civil sanctions.

According to OFAC’s compliance framework, companies dealing in virtual currency are expected to implement screening, geofencing, escalation, and audit trails that can withstand post-transaction scrutiny.

The policy backdrop complicates one part of the narrative. The United States lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash on March 21, 2025, following prior court battles.

Activity involving Tornado Cash during the period when it was sanctioned remains within OFAC’s purview, and dealings tied to still-blocked counterparties, including DPRK actors, are unaffected by the Tornado change. That means the timing and counterparties of the alleged WLFI buyer interactions matter more than a generic label about “Tornado users.”

The national-security context is acute. The FBI has attributed the $1.5 billion Bybit hack earlier this year to North Korea, keeping DPRK crypto theft at the front of sanctions and AML policy. The Bybit event is one of the largest on record and part of a trend that has driven elevated enforcement.

The senators’ letter is framed within that pattern, in which even unintentional interactions with sanctioned parties can trigger civil exposure and in which remedial controls are evaluated for efficacy, not intent.

The market and fundraising profile set the scale. Reuters reported in June that a UAE-based fund committed $100 million to WLFI tokens, and a separate 2025 report estimated that more than $550 million had been raised earlier in the year.

If Treasury or DOJ identifies sanctionable flows within those sales, blocking orders and penalties could reach not only project wallets but also distributions owed under the services agreement. The economic split disclosed by WLFI, with 75% of net sale proceeds to DT Marks DeFi LLC, makes that pathway direct.

Enforcement paths now under discussion break into four tracks.

First, OFAC civil action is the most common tool, triggered by sales to or for the benefit of blocked persons, with potential civil penalties, blocking of tainted wallets, and remedial undertakings such as enhanced screening and monitored upgrades, according to OFAC guidance.

Second, DOJ criminal exposure is less common in token-sale contexts and typically turns on willful evasion or false statements; recent mixer and laundering cases illustrate that posture, according to Reuters.

Third, FinCEN can exert “311-style” pressure through special measures targeting convertible virtual currency mixing, which, if applied to flows involving WLFI counterparties, would raise reporting and diligence expectations for banks and exchanges that handle those transactions.

Fourth, the SEC could revisit the structure if WLFI token distributions meet investment-contract criteria, which could drive disclosure or rescission demands for U.S. distributions even as market-structure bills evolve.

Policy shifts and operations widen WLFI’s exposure

Policy debate in 2025 adds another layer. The GENIUS Act established a federal framework for stablecoins, and the House advanced market-structure legislation through the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

According to Steptoe’s analysis, these developments do not exempt governance tokens from sanctions or Bank Secrecy Act duties, and they will not insulate prior distributions from legacy securities analysis. The direction of travel on decentralization does not alter the enforcement of strict liability sanctions.

A separate operational thread will draw the investigators’ attention. WLFI has acknowledged freezing and reallocating specific wallets following phishing incidents, with a plan to KYC rightful owners and use contract logic to move balances.

Public posts and September coverage described hundreds of wallets blacklisted during post-launch turmoil, and subsequent communications laid out bulk remediation. Those actions indicate the presence of admin keys and centralized controls that can freeze and reassign assets.

That capability can help victims and also tell regulators that WLFI has the discretion and infrastructure to implement sanctions and AML controls that meet VASP-level expectations. The question for Treasury and DOJ is whether those controls were in place, tuned, and enforced during the periods when the alleged high-risk buyers purchased tokens.

In September, we reported that WLFI block-listed Justin Sun’s wallet, which held approximately 595 million WLFI tokens (roughly US$104 million), amid allegations that an exchange linked to Sun used user tokens to suppress WLFI’s price through sales.

In addition to this high-profile freeze, WLFI, within its first week of public trading, block-listed some 272 other wallet addresses, an action that raised fresh concerns about the project’s governance and decentralization.

For those sizing potential exposure, a simple scenario set, anchored in public figures and industry priors on the prevalence of tainted flow, helps frame the ranges.

If WLFI raised $650 million to $800 million life-to-date, and if tainted buyers represent 0.5% to 5% of sale volume, the tainted slice would be $3.25 million to $40 million.

Given WLFI’s disclosure that 75% of sale proceeds flow to DT Marks DeFi LLC, the cash flow at risk to freeze, penalty, or remediation could be $2.4 million to $30 million under OFAC outcomes.

These are scenarios, not assertions, and they hinge on Treasury validating the specific wallet links described by Accountable US and any additional flows surfaced by government analysis.

Input/Output	Low	Base	Stress
WLFI proceeds considered	$650M	$725M	$800M
Tainted-buyer share	0.5%	2%	5%
Tainted slice ($)	$3.25M	$14.5M	$40M
75% proceeds to DT Marks DeFi (at risk)	$2.44M	$10.88M	$30M

Adversarial clusters elevate governance risk

Governance integrity will also be a focal point if Treasury believes adversarial holders are clustered in size. Governance tokens can influence protocol parameters, treasury disbursements, and roadmap choices.

If flagged wallets equate to a material share of voting power under WLFI’s quorum math, even a minority bloc could sway close votes when combined with one or two whales. That becomes relevant for U.S. venues reviewing listing and governance-enablement, and for banks that must assess customer exposure to blocked property or influence.

WLFI is likely to argue that it screened, rejected non-compliant buyers, and tightened controls as new information emerged. A stress test of that claim sits in the logs: dated lists of blocked addresses, vendor attestations, timestamps that precede the relevant sales, and consistency across high-profile and retail wallets.

Treasury will also separate the timing of Tornado Cash usage from any live sanctions exposure to Lazarus-linked wallets and blocked jurisdictions. Remediation typically involves a combination of blocked-property management, disgorgement, and prospective undertakings, which may include independent monitors.

Cross-market spillovers are now a practical concern. If OFAC validates clusters tied to WLFI flows, U.S. venues would move to disable governance functions or pause integrations pending clarity, and offshore venues would enhance screening, reflecting steps taken after prior DPRK-attributed hacks.

Stablecoin rails governed by the GENIUS Act could ring-fence WLFI-adjacent flows if issuers and partner banks see exposure to blocked property through bridges or smart contract interactions.

Warren and Reed framed their request around national security risks and potential conflicts associated with a project linked to a former president. According to Reuters, the UAE fund commitment and earlier raises underscore the scale of funds that could be implicated if enforcement touches treasury assets or future unlocks.

OFAC documentation states that civil sanctions do not require proof of intent, and that the agency can impose penalties and blocking orders on a strict-liability basis.

Could Democrats push for impeachment or prosecution?

While the senators’ referral alone doesn’t create impeachment exposure, Democrats could frame any confirmed sanctions-related flows into Trump-affiliated WLFI entities as a potential conflict of interest, particularly if official presidential actions intersect with the Treasury or the DOJ’s handling of the matter.

Impeachment does not require a statutory crime; it turns on abuse of power, corruption, or violations of public trust.

If investigators found evidence that the president sought to influence enforcement, shield WLFI from scrutiny, or otherwise used his office to protect financial interests tied to the project, that could give House Democrats a plausible narrative for articles of impeachment.

Absent such conduct, however, civil OFAC exposure from tainted WLFI buyers would not, on its own, constitute an impeachable offense.

Strict-liability sanctions issues within a private business become politically relevant only if they are shown to overlap with presidential decision-making or foreign-benefit concerns.

The impeachment risk, therefore, hinges less on the allegations about WLFI’s buyer pool and more on what Trump, as president, did, or is perceived to have done, in response.

However, should the investigation uncover criminal activity, the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling does not provide Trump with blanket protection from criminal exposure.

Immunity attaches only to official acts; private, political, and business conduct remains chargeable. In the WLFI context, potential crimes would turn on proof of willfulness or quid-pro-quo intent, for example, willful sanctions evasion under IEEPA, money-laundering, securities fraud, or bribery tied to an “official act.”

By contrast, unknowing sanctions issues typically lead to civil OFAC penalties, not criminal counts. The ruling could still complicate prosecutions by limiting the use of “official-act” evidence (e.g., contacts with Treasury/DOJ). Still, it doesn’t insulate private financial ventures from liability if prosecutors can show the requisite intent.

El Salvador executed its largest single-day Bitcoin (BTC) purchase since adopting the cryptocurrency in 2021, acquiring roughly 1,090 BTC worth approximately $100 million as prices slid below $90,000 on Nov. 18.

President Nayib Bukele disclosed the transaction on X with a screenshot from the government’s Bitcoin dashboard showing total holdings had climbed to 7,474 BTC, worth between $680 million and $700 million at current prices.

The acquisition marks a 17% jump in national reserves over seven days and represents the most significant single-session addition to El Salvador’s stack.

The buy landed during a broader risk-asset selloff that erased Bitcoin’s 2025 gains and pushed prices nearly 30% below the October record above $126,000. The drawdown stems from doubts over Federal Reserve rate cuts and a correction in artificial intelligence stocks.

The purchase extends El Salvador’s dollar-cost-averaging program, launched in November 2022, with a commitment to acquire 1 BTC per day.

The government has maintained that accumulation strategy through both bull and bear cycles, occasionally adding larger tranches when prices fall sharply.

On-chain structure and transparency

The new coins flow into El Salvador’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a custody framework the National Bitcoin Office deployed in August 2025. The structure distributes holdings across multiple wallets, each capped at 500 BTC, with a public dashboard aggregating balances.

Before the recent buy, disclosed reserves ranged from 6,100 to 6,313 BTC. Bukele’s May and September updates showed several hundred million dollars in unrealized profit when Bitcoin traded near $100,000.

Third-party trackers, including Bitcoin Treasuries and KuCoin, now report the updated figure of 7,474 BTC. The acquisition registers as a small fraction of daily Bitcoin turnover but carries weight against thin spot order books during risk-off sessions.

The timing positions El Salvador as one of the few institutional buyers willing to add exposure while exchange-traded funds record net outflows.

Additionally, the purchase reignites friction with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

El Salvador secured a 40-month, $1.4 billion Extended Fund Facility in late 2024 and early 2025, with loan documents requiring the government to scale back provisions of its 2021 Bitcoin Law.

Tax payments in Bitcoin were prohibited, and private sector acceptance shifted from mandatory to voluntary. Per the IMF staff report, authorities “remain committed to not increasing the public sector’s exposure to Bitcoin,” and directors welcomed that pledge while warning about financial-stability and fiscal risks.

In March, El Salvador committed “not to accumulate further bitcoins at the level of the overall public sector” as part of the program. Yet, Bukele has continued buying anyway.

The government maintained its daily acquisition policy after the IMF agreement and executed a ceremonial 21 BTC purchase in September to mark “Bitcoin Day,” which contradicted the program’s terms.

IMF officials have attempted to reconcile the discrepancy by stating that increases to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve remain consistent with conditionality, without clarifying how purchases by the National Bitcoin Office avoid adding to overall state exposure.

Market depth and sovereign signaling

The $100 million order flow carries symbolic weight beyond its size. El Salvador operates one of the few sovereign Bitcoin treasuries and has demonstrated a willingness to lean into drawdowns, even amid multi-year IMF obligations.

The buy arrived as Bitcoin broke below $90,000 for the first time in roughly seven months, a threshold that triggered selling from leveraged positions and institutional holders.

From a market microstructure perspective, the transaction provides visible support in thin books during a session when most institutional capital fled risk assets.

The government’s dashboard update and Bukele’s public disclosure reinforce the administration’s commitment to accumulation regardless of short-term price action or external pressure from multilateral lenders.

XRP is under renewed pressure as the broader market downturn drags its profitability metrics back to levels last seen during Donald Trump’s November 2024 re-election.

Glassnode data shows that only 58.5% of XRP’s circulating supply is now in profit. That is the weakest reading since late November 2024, when the token hovered around $0.53.

Even at today’s price of roughly $2.15, about 41.5% of all circulating XRP, equating to nearly 26.5 billion tokens, sits at a realized loss.

According to the firm, the imbalance reflects how much of this year’s trading volume clustered near elevated price zones. That concentration has left late buyers exposed as momentum fades.

According to CryptoSlate’s data, XRP has dropped 12% in the past six months and trades 40% below its July cycle peak of $3.65.

Why is XRP struggling?

Notably, derivatives activity has reinforced that cautious sentiment.

According to CoinGlass data, XRP futures open interest has collapsed to about $3.8 billion, down sharply from almost $10 billion earlier this year.

Open interest tracks the value of active futures contracts. As a result, lower levels typically show that speculative demand is weakening and traders are pulling back from directional bets.

This explains why XRP’s price growth has stalled significantly since its post-election spike. Indeed, XRP has traded chiefly sideways in a tight range around $2.10, disappointing traders who expected follow-through above that level.

Apart from that, XRP’s price has struggled significantly because its long-term holders have stepped up their profit-taking.

Glassnode noted that investors who accumulated XRP below $1 ahead of the late-2024 run are now unwinding positions at a breakneck pace.

According to the firm, this cohort profit-realization activity has risen 240% since September, climbing from about $65 million a day to nearly $220 million.

Strong fundamentals

Despite the short-term weakness, the token’s underlying fundamentals remain intact.

Earlier this year, Ripple resolved its multi-year dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) through a settlement following several favorable rulings.

At the same time, Ripple’s recent $500 million raise, strategic acquisitions of Palisade and Hidden Roads, and several partnerships are strengthening the company’s product suite and expanding its global presence.

Market analysts view these developments as supportive of the asset’s long-term positioning because they build out the ecosystem that relies on the token.

Moreover, institutional interest in the digital assets continues to rise.

Several spot XRP ETFs have launched in November 2025, including products from Franklin Templeton, Bitwise, 21Shares, and CoinShares. Notably, Canary Capital’s XRPC ETF has already drawn nearly $278 million in early inflows, according to SoSoValue data.

At the same time, the blockchain analytics platform Santiment noted that XRP remains a major topic across social platforms, with discussions focusing on ETF launches, market volatility, and the token’s positioning relative to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano.

Additionally, the firm also flagged recent retail sales as evidence of an imminent price rebound.

It noted that wallets holding fewer than 100 XRP have sold 1.38% of their balances since early November. Retail capitulation often precedes rebounds, and analysts are watching the trend as a potential sign of recovery.

Bitcoin is quietly walking its way down the liquidity staircase, and the next solid step sits around $85,000.

That number is not coming from a Fibonacci retracement, a moving average crossover, or any other technical analysis ‘gold standard.’

It comes from my simple grid of horizontal bands, grounded in factors that actually move markets: order-book depth, leverage positioning, psychological interest points, and historical price movements over an 18-month window.

Basically, these are the prices at which traders place their stop-loss and take-profit markers.

On a 30-minute chart, those bands form thick channels, and over the past year, Bitcoin has treated them like rungs on a ladder, pausing, stalling, and reversing at the same prices again and again.

Over the last month, that ladder has been pointing down.

From complacent highs to a vacuum below

The top white band is where Bitcoin found its all-time high of $126,000. It traded within this zone from May to October, with two slight dips below during September. Once it broke below during the tariff crash on October 11, it finally gave way completely at the start of this month.

At the start of the slide, Bitcoin wicked down to a critical price point at $106,400, which I’ve talked about at length. Historically, when price wicks down on the 30-minute chart like this, it’s an ominous sign that it will eventually find its way to that level. And this time was no different.

Price action started to cluster at the top of the tight yellow band, roughly between $112,000 and $106,400. Every attempt to break higher into the next set of white lines struggled. The channel acted like a ceiling that kept absorbing buy pressure.

When that ceiling finally gave way, it did not do so gently.

The moment bids thinned out at that band, Bitcoin did what it often does in these grids: it sought out the next area of resting liquidity. The drop through the low $100,000s into the mid-$90,000s looked violent on lower timeframes, yet on the map of channels it resembled a jump from one floor to the next.

Price then spent time grinding across the $97,000–$100,000 zone. This area had already been highlighted months earlier as a thick structure of orange lines. The psychological $100,000 support level gave up without a fight.

$100,000 to $93,000 was the place where spot buyers had shown interest before and where derivative traders had repeatedly built and unwound positions. Once again, the market treated it as a staging ground, not as a destination.

As soon as that zone exhausted, the staircase pulled Bitcoin lower.

The current battlefield: the purple band

Fast forward to the latest charts. Bitcoin now oscillates in the low $90,000s and high $80,000s, inside a wide purple channel.

You can see how the previous supports have flipped into resistance. Levels around $92,000–$93,000, which caught price on the way down the first time, now cap intraday bounces.

Each revisit attracts selling, evidence that trapped longs are using any strength to exit and that fresh shorts are leaning against a level they trust.

Underneath, the purple lines map a series of shelves: $89,000, $87,000, then the last major one at roughly $85,000. These shelves are not arbitrary.

They are prices at which liquidity has clustered consistently since the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US. Market makers recycled inventory there, whales layered bids there, and funding and open interest shifted there. In other words, this is where the market has history.

Bitcoin is already sitting close to the mid-section of that band. Volatility has compressed compared with the waterfall move that sliced through the $97,000–$100,000 zone.

That change in character often precedes a second leg, as participants wait for the market to choose a direction before committing new risk. If selling pressure returns, there is not much in the way between current prices and the bottom of the purple channel.

Why $85,000 matters

The $85,000 region stands out for three reasons.

First, it represents the deepest pool of liquidity inside the current purple band. The density of levels around $85,000–$86,000 suggests that a lot of historical positioning converges there. Markets are attracted to such magnets, especially after a series of failed attempts to reclaim higher ground.

Second, the path between $89,000 and $85,000 is relatively clean on the grid. There are fewer intermediate bands, which means that once the current shelf gives way, price has room to accelerate until it meets the next cluster of orders.

Recent history supports that idea: the break under $110,000 did not grind lower in a slow trend, it air-dropped to the next meaningful zone.

Third, reaching that level would complete a measured move that mirrors the previous leg down from the $109,000–$103,000 area. The market often works in symmetrical swings when it hunts out fresh liquidity pockets. Traders who watch these structures may see $85,000 as a logical completion point for the present sequence.

None of this guarantees a visit. What it offers is a roadmap. If Bitcoin continues to respect the same grid it has been respecting for over 18 months, $85,000 becomes the next stop in a story that has already written several chapters in advance.

What lies below the purple floor

If Bitcoin does tag the bottom of the purple channel, the story does not end there. The grid extends further, into a landscape of green lines that start around $84,000 and stretch toward the high $70,000s.

Should that band fail, attention shifts to the pink cluster between $77,000 and $74,000. Then the violet channel would be next, where the line spacing tightens again in that region, a visual hint that the market spent a lot of time transacting there in the past.

This is a significant price point in my opinion. It is where Bitcoin posted a new all-time high just before the last halving, and just a little higher than the 2021 high. $73,000 acted as a ceiling going into 2025 and could very well be our support lifeline in 2026-2027.

Long-term holders who view Bitcoin’s current correction as a buying opportunity may have resting bids in that pocket. Short-term traders who sold the breakdown from $100,000 may also choose to secure profits there.

For those with a weak constitution, I recommend looking away now.

The final line on my map goes as low as $49,800. That level marks the lowest significant shelf in the current structure. If the market ever reaches it, sentiment will likely feel washed out.

Yet from a channel perspective, it would still be a touch of an old liquidity pool, not a journey into uncharted territory.

The bear market, if we are now in it, could bottom around this price. $49,800 is a level that’s been rigorously defended at times across the last two cycles.

Falling under that would likely trigger extreme panic among Bitcoiners and new ETF buys alike. It would feel like the sky is falling to any bulls who bought in after 2020 or who don’t use a dollar-cost-averaging strategy.

Personally, I like $73,400 as the bear market floor for this cycle. It feels bearish enough to be realistic. There’s history, liquidity, and support in that region.

A roadmap, not a prophecy

The key to using these channels is discipline. They do not tell us that Bitcoin must fall to $85,000, or that it cannot first bounce back to $97,000 or $100,000. They offer a way to view the market as a series of probable reaction zones rather than a random walk.

Right now, the story on the 30-minute chart is simple.

Bitcoin has stepped down from one liquidity shelf to the next for weeks. It now wobbles inside a purple corridor where past positioning has been heavy. The bottom of that corridor sits near $85,000, and the layers beneath it, in the low $80,000s and mid $70,000s, are already marked out.

If the selling continues, these are the places where the market is most likely to slow down, consolidate, and potentially reverse. For traders who know how to position around those moments, the map is already drawn.

None of this is intended to be individual financial advice. These are my price points to watch for Bitcoin’s next move. It just so happens that Bitcoin has tagged them consistently since early 2024. What will happen next, not even Satoshi knows.

For more than a decade, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) has, for one reason or another, stood apart from the rest of the blockchain industry.

Built in 2012, long before the rise of modern DeFi, it embraced a minimalist design of fast settlement, deterministic consensus, and no economic incentives for validators.

That architecture helped XRPL grow into a trusted payments network, but it also left it structurally different from the yield-driven systems that now dominate the digital asset economy.

A payments chain in a yield-powered economy

XRPL’s consensus model, known as Proof of Association (PoA), relies on a Unique Node List (UNL) of trusted validators.

The system has no block rewards, no slashing, and no competition among validators for block production. Here, network fees are anti-spam tools and not revenue sources.

That structure once defined XRPL’s strength, but today it is also becoming its constraint. DeFi ecosystems thrive on yield mechanisms, and capital tends to flow toward chains that reward participation.

This is why XRPL’s total value locked, at around $87 million, looks modest compared with rival ecosystems, such as Solana and Ethereum, which are driven by staking and liquidity incentives.

Considering this, Ayo Akinyele, RippleX’s head of engineering, highlighted how XRP’s role could be significantly expanded far beyond simple settlement, while floating the idea of “native staking on the XRPL.”

According to him:

“[Native staking] would change how value flows through the XRPL network in ways we’d need to think through carefully. So, talking about the idea for XRP helps us understand what could evolve and what should stay the same.”

XRPL staking

In walking through what staking would require, Akinyele laid out the unavoidable implications.

First, XRPL would need a source of rewards, which it currently lacks. Second, it would need a way to distribute those rewards without compromising decentralization.

According to him, both requirements would reshape XRPL’s carefully balanced incentive model.

He explained that introducing rewards would create tensions that XRPL deliberately avoids. Validators would suddenly have financial motives that conflict with the network’s principle of neutrality.

Even more critically, financial incentives tend to drive operators to optimize for cost, clustering validators in the same cloud region or hardware configuration. That would undermine XRPL’s distributed trust model and weaken the properties that have preserved its resilience for more than a decade.

Akinyele noted:

“Once you add incentives, I agree operators start optimizing for cost: cheaper hardware, the same cloud region, centralized setups. That’s exactly the centralizing force the XRPL avoids by not using economic rewards to motivate validator behavior.”

At the same time, fee redistribution, a standard tool in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) systems, would invite Sybil attacks if applied broadly or political pressure if limited to UNL validators.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz echoed these concerns and highlighted two experimental ideas for how XRPL could address some of them. These include a two-layer stake-based consensus and a ZK-proof model for smart contract verification.

However, he made it clear that while both are technically interesting, they are far from viable.

According to him, they introduce significant risk for benefits that are largely theoretical. He added that XRPL does not currently suffer from the performance bottlenecks those systems are intended to solve.

XRPL users want yield

If staking remains incompatible with XRPL’s core architecture, the blockchain network users’ demand for yield is not.

As a result, that demand has migrated outward, into sidechains and bridges that wrap XRP and reintroduce incentives in adjacent ecosystems.

The most visible example is mXRP, a liquid staking token launched on XRPL’s EVM-compatible sidechain.

Through Midas, XRP holders can stake their assets, receive mXRP, and deploy it across DeFi protocols for up to 8% annualized returns.

Notably, the traction for this product has been strong. mXRP now holds around $25 million in TVL and recently expanded to the BNB Chain, where roughly 480,000 XRP holders collectively control nearly $800 million in wrapped XRP.

Moreover, listing mXRP on Lista’s markets has allowed holders to layer yields by using the token as collateral in liquidity pools, lending markets, and reward programs.

These numbers show that the market is building the incentives that XRPL avoids, and it is doing so in systems that sit just outside the core ledger.

This divergence underscores XRPL’s central dilemma. The chain’s architecture wasn’t built for the incentive structures that drive DeFi participation.

Yet, its users increasingly seek those opportunities and are finding them in ecosystems that wrap or extend XRP rather than rely on the ledger itself.

What does this mean for XRP?

The broader significance of the staking thought experiment is not about whether XRPL should adopt staking. It is about what these discussions reveal about XRP’s evolving economic role.

If XRPL were to introduce even a limited form of native staking—not for consensus but for network services or extended functionality—it would fundamentally alter XRP’s value profile. This shift would reshape how the asset is used and valued across the ecosystem.

Reliable on-chain yield would likely attract new classes of investors and increase capital retention within the ecosystem.

As a result, liquidity would deepen and XRP’s role as collateral could expand. At the same time, the digital asset would begin to behave more like other productive tokens in the DeFi landscape.

However, pursuing such a model risks undermining the neutrality and predictability that have historically defined XRP.

This would risk aligning XRP with the behavior of typical Proof-of-Stake (PoS) tokens, where investor interest is driven primarily by yield incentives instead of functional utility

Moreover, it could blur the line between XRP as a liquidity instrument and XRP as a yield-bearing asset, creating new volatility patterns and governance pressures.

The alternative path of preserving XRPL’s lean and incentive-free architecture would keep XRP aligned with its original purpose. It would remain a highly efficient bridge currency and settlement tool, with its value anchored in utility rather than rewards.

In this case, its growth might be slower, but stability would remain a core feature.

In this sense, the staking debate is less about staking itself and more about defining what XRP should be in its next decade.

As DeFi grows, programmability efforts progress, and cross-chain integrations expand, the question is whether XRPL can evolve just enough to remain competitive without losing the qualities that made it resilient in the first place.

That balance may ultimately determine not just the future of XRPL, but the economic future of XRP itself.

Yesterday’s outage showed how dependent the modern web is on a handful of core infrastructure providers.

In fact, it’s so dependent that a single configuration error made large parts of the internet totally unreachable for several hours.

Many of us work in crypto because we understand the dangers of centralization in finance, but the events of yesterday were a clear reminder that centralization at the internet’s core is just as urgent a problem to solve.

The obvious giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft run enormous chunks of cloud infrastructure.

But equally critical are firms like Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, DigitalOcean, and CDN (servers that deliver websites faster around the world) or DNS (the “address book” of the internet) providers such as UltraDNS and Dyn.

Most people barely know their names, yet their outages can be just as crippling, as we saw yesterday.

To start with, here’s a list of companies you may never have heard of that are critical to keeping the internet running as expected.

Category	Company	What They Control	Impact If They Go Down
Core Infra (DNS/CDN/DDoS)	Cloudflare	CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, Zero Trust, Workers	Huge portions of global web traffic fail; thousands of sites become unreachable.
Core Infra (CDN)	Akamai	Enterprise CDN for banks, logins, commerce	Major enterprise services, banks, and login systems break.
Core Infra (CDN)	Fastly	CDN, edge compute	Global outage potential (as seen in 2021: Reddit, Shopify, gov.uk, NYT).
Cloud Provider	AWS	Compute, hosting, storage, APIs	SaaS apps, streaming platforms, fintech, and IoT networks fail.
Cloud Provider	Google Cloud	YouTube, Gmail, enterprise backends	Massive disruption across Google services and dependent apps.
Cloud Provider	Microsoft Azure	Enterprise & government clouds	Office365, Teams, Outlook, and Xbox Live outages.
DNS Infrastructure	Verisign	.com & .net TLDs, root DNS	Catastrophic global routing failures for large parts of the web.
DNS Providers	GoDaddy / Cloudflare / Squarespace	DNS management for millions of domains	Entire companies vanish from the internet.
Certificate Authority	Let’s Encrypt	TLS certificates for most of the web	HTTPS breaks globally; users see security errors everywhere.
Certificate Authority	DigiCert / GlobalSign	Enterprise SSL	Large corporate sites lose HTTPS trust.
Security / CDN	Imperva	DDoS, WAF, CDN	Protected sites become inaccessible or vulnerable.
Load Balancers	F5 Networks	Enterprise load balancing	Banking, hospitals, and government services can fail nationwide.
Tier-1 Backbone	Lumen (Level 3)	Global internet backbone	Routing issues cause global latency spikes and regional outages.
Tier-1 Backbone	Cogent / Zayo / Telia	Transit and peering	Regional or country-level internet disruptions.
App Distribution	Apple App Store	iOS app updates & installs	iOS app ecosystem effectively freezes.
App Distribution	Google Play Store	Android app distribution	Android apps cannot install or update globally.
Payments	Stripe	Web payments infrastructure	Thousands of apps lose the ability to accept payments.
Identity / Login	Auth0 / Okta	Authentication & SSO	Logins break for thousands of apps.
Communications	Twilio	2FA SMS, OTP, messaging	Large portion of global 2FA and OTP codes fail.

What happened yesterday

Yesterday’s culprit was Cloudflare, a company that routes almost 20% of all web traffic.

It now says the outage started with a small database configuration change that accidentally caused a bot-detection file to include duplicate items.

That file suddenly grew beyond a strict size limit. When Cloudflare’s servers tried to load it, they failed, and many websites that use Cloudflare began returning HTTP 5xx errors (error codes users see when a server breaks).

Here’s the simple chain:

A Small Database Tweak Sets Off a Big Chain Reaction.

The trouble began at 11:05 UTC when a permissions update made the system pull extra, duplicate information while building the file used to score bots.

That file normally includes about sixty items. The duplicates pushed it past a hard cap of 200. When machines across the network loaded the oversized file, the bot component failed to start, and the servers returned errors.

According to Cloudflare, both the current and older server paths were affected. One returned 5xx errors. The other assigned a bot score of zero, which could have falsely flagged traffic for customers who block based on bot score (Cloudflare’s bot vs. human detection).

Diagnosis was tricky because the bad file was rebuilt every five minutes from a database cluster being updated piece by piece.

If the system pulled from an updated piece, the file was bad. If not, it was good. The network would recover, then fail again, as versions switched.

According to Cloudflare, this on-off pattern initially looked like a possible DDoS, especially since a third-party status page also failed around the same time. Focus shifted once teams linked errors to the bot-detection configuration.

By 13:05 UTC, Cloudflare applied a bypass for Workers KV (login checks) and Cloudflare Access (authentication system), routing around the failing behavior to cut impact.

The main fix came when teams stopped generating and distributing new bot files, pushed a known good file, and restarted core servers.

Cloudflare says core traffic began flowing by 14:30, and all downstream services recovered by 17:06.

The failure highlights some design tradeoffs.

Cloudflare’s systems enforce strict limits to keep performance predictable. That helps avoid runaway resource use, but it also means a malformed internal file can trigger a hard stop instead of a graceful fallback.

Because bot detection sits on the main path for many services, one module’s failure cascaded into the CDN, security features, Turnstile (CAPTCHA alternative), Workers KV, Access, and dashboard logins. Cloudflare also noted extra latency as debugging tools consumed CPU while adding context to errors.

On the database side, a narrow permissions tweak had wide effects.

The change made the system “see” more tables than before. The job that builds the bot-detection file did not filter tightly enough, so it grabbed duplicate column names and expanded the file beyond the 200-item cap.

The loading error then triggered server failures and 5xx responses on affected paths.

Impact varied by product. Core CDN and security services threw server errors.

Workers KV saw elevated 5xx rates because requests to its gateway passed through the failing path. Cloudflare Access had authentication failures until the 13:05 bypass, and dashboard logins broke when Turnstile could not load.

Cloudflare Email Security temporarily lost an IP reputation source, reducing spam detection accuracy for a period, though the company said there was no critical customer impact. After the good file was restored, a backlog of login attempts briefly strained internal APIs before normalizing.

The timeline is straightforward.

The database change landed at 11:05 UTC. First customer-facing errors appeared around 11:20–11:28.

Teams opened an incident at 11:35, applied the Workers KV and Access bypass at 13:05, stopped creating and spreading new files around 14:24, pushed a known good file and saw global recovery by 14:30, and marked full restoration at 17:06.

According to Cloudflare, automated tests flagged anomalies at 11:31, and manual investigation began at 11:32, which explains the pivot from suspected attack to configuration rollback within two hours.

Time (UTC)	Status	Action or Impact
11:05	Change deployed	Database permissions update led to duplicate entries
11:20–11:28	Impact starts	HTTP 5xx surge as the bot file exceeds the 200-item limit
13:05	Mitigation	Bypass for Workers KV and Access reduces error surface
13:37–14:24	Rollback prep	Stop bad file propagation, validate known good file
14:30	Core recovery	Good file deployed, core traffic routes normally
17:06	Resolved	Downstream services fully restored

The numbers explain both cause and containment.

A five-minute rebuild cycle repeatedly reintroduced bad files as different database pieces updated.

A 200-item cap protects memory use, and a typical count near sixty left comfortable headroom, until the duplicate entries arrived.

The cap worked as designed, but the lack of a tolerant “safe load” for internal files turned a bad config into a crash instead of a soft failure with a fallback model. According to Cloudflare, that’s a key area to harden.

Cloudflare says it will harden how internal configuration is validated, add more global kill switches for feature pipelines, stop error reporting from consuming large CPU during incidents, review error handling across modules, and improve how configuration is distributed.

The company called this its worst incident since 2019 and apologized for the impact. According to Cloudflare, there was no attack; recovery came from halting the bad file, restoring a known good file, and restarting server processes.

The Bitcoin market is undergoing a significant transition, with traders aggressively positioning for a year-end close beneath the $90,000 threshold.

This comes as the flagship digital asset briefly slid to a seven-month low of $89,970 on Nov. 18 before recovering to $91,526 as of press time.

As a result, crypto traders’ sentiment has significantly shifted amid a convergence of structural capital flight and tightening macro conditions.

Options desk pricing Bitcoin below $90,000

The most definitive evidence of this bearish conviction comes from options flows and prediction markets.

Crypto options platform Derive.xyz told CryptoSlate that traders are now pricing a 50% probability that Bitcoin will end the year below $90,000. This is almost in congruence with crypto bettors on Polymarket who believe the top crypto has a 36% of ending the year below $80,000.

Indeed, the bearish positioning is manifesting in aggressive risk mitigation, suggesting that professional desks are now actively betting against previously held bullish consensus.

Derive.xyz noted that Bitcoin’s Implied volatility (IV), both short-term and long-term, has been rising in tandem. For context, BTC’s short-term IV has jumped substantially from 41% to 49% in 2 weeks, while long-term volatility (180-day) has moved almost in lockstep, rising from 46% to 49%.

This implies that traders do not view the current decline as a short-lived blip, but rather as the initial phase of a more prolonged and deeper structural shift in macro conditions and market sentiment.

Derive.xyz added:

“With ongoing concerns about the resilience of the US job market and the probability of a December rate cut slipping to barely above a coin-toss, there’s very little in the macro backdrop giving traders a reason to stay bullish into the close of the year.”

Further confirming this pessimism is the widening of the 30-day put skew, which measures the premium paid for downside protection (puts) relative to the premium for upside exposure (calls).

The skew has plummeted from –2.9% to a highly defensive –5.3%, signaling that traders are not just hedging, but are paying dearly to protect against a significant, sustained drop.

According to the firm, this is the hallmark of a market transitioning into a new, more fearful volatility regime, where risk aversion dominates positioning through year-end.

ETF outflows

This defensive options positioning has been directly catalyzed by the dramatic reversal of flow within the Spot Bitcoin ETF complex.

For much of 2025, these ETFs provided the essential marginal bid, acting as the primary stabilizer by consistently absorbing supply. However, that function has now ceased.

The extent of the institutional retreat is staggering, with Bitcoin ETFs recording gross outflows of nearly $3 billion this month alone ($2.5 billion net), according to SoSoValue data. Notably, this is on course to be the second-largest month for outflows since these products launched in 2024.

The largest institutional vehicle, BlackRock’s IBIT, typically the market’s strongest structural buyer, has accounted for the majority of these withdrawals.

This sustained selling removes the market’s most reliable absorption mechanism, leading to a crucial consequence where structural demand evaporates, and liquidity thins dramatically.

In this liquidity-thin environment, volatility rises, and what would typically be a shallow dip quickly deepens into a price drawdown.

Moreover, parallel actions across the ecosystem have amplified this absence of a consistent institutional buyer. Major BTC treasury companies have paused their historical accumulation patterns, and in some cases, reduced holdings.

Even MicroStrategy (Strategy), a corporate bastion of bullishness, is showing signs of stress. Their recent 8,178 BTC purchase was small compared to earlier buys and was executed at a price approximately 10% above current levels.

Consequently, 40% of their 649,870 BTC treasury is now in loss, fundamentally weakening the perceived stability of the corporate treasury floor.

Therefore, while ETF outflows alone don’t dictate price, their presence in a contracting liquidity environment magnifies every other negative signal.

Long-term holders selling

The current downturn is simultaneously being shaped by selling from an unexpected corner: Long-Term Holders (LTHs).

These holders, historically the most resilient cohort, have collectively moved or sold over 800,000 BTC in the past 30 days. While LTH capitulation typically marks late-stage drawdowns just before a bottom, the dynamic this time appears slightly different.

Ki Young Ju of CryptoQuant has suggested that this movement is less about the wholesale collapse of confidence and more about internal rotation.

According to him, the old whales are strategically offloading their generational holdings to a new, structurally sound class of institutional buyers like sovereign funds, pensions, and multi-asset managers.

He noted that these new institutions generally possess much lower churn rates and significantly longer investment horizons.

So, if true, this rotation could be seen as long-term bullish, essentially transferring supply from early adopters to stable, perpetual investors.

However, the near-term price action of these offloadings remains detrimental.

On-chain metrics highlight this acute selling pressure, with Glassnode data showing that Short-Term Holders (STHs) are realizing losses of approximately $427 million per day, a level not seen since the November 2022 capitulation.

As a result, the supply of STH BTC held at a loss has surged to levels historically consistent with market bottoms.

However, analysts at Swissblock argued that panic-driven “capitulation selling” remains absent, while adding that the current setup clearly signals an “open bottoming window.”

Considering this, this means the period of maximum uncertainty implies that while a floor may be forming, the market has yet to confirm it, and continued selling pressure could easily push the price lower before stabilization.

Macro headwinds tighten the noose.

Ultimately, the most decisive factor driving current behavior is the increasingly hostile global macro backdrop.

Bitcoin is trading less like an idiosyncratic asset and more like a high-beta expression of global risk sentiment. When global liquidity contracts, high-risk assets invariably suffer.

Expectations for a December Federal Reserve rate cut, which was a key bullish catalyst priced confidently earlier in the year, have essentially collapsed to even odds.

According to CME FedWatch data, traders now assign a 46.6% chance of a rate cut at the Dec. 10 FOMC meeting and a 53.4% probability that the Fed keeps rates unchanged.

This renewed hawkishness has translated directly into tighter liquidity, amplifying risk aversion as rising Treasury yields and fragile equity markets pressure all asset classes. Crypto is caught squarely in this undertow.

With liquidity contracting globally, traders are being forced to hedge risk aggressively into year-end rather than take speculative upside bets.

This macro pressure validates the bearish signals seen in the options market. On-chain momentum indicators place Bitcoin squarely in the Pessimism ‘Correction’ zone around 0.72.

If this metric continues to fall, technical models point toward a critical correction target of $87,500, a key support level dating back to early 2025.

So, any price stabilization would require a strong reversal in liquidity and sentiment, allowing the market to consolidate between $90,000 and $110,000.

Wintermute stated:

“Until BTC moves back toward the top of its range, market breadth is likely to stay narrow and narratives will remain short-lived.”

US-traded spot Bitcoin ETFs hemorrhaged $2.57 billion in net outflows through Nov. 17, the funds’ worst monthly drawdown since their January 2024 launch.

In the same month, Bitcoin dropped 14.7% and briefly touched $89,253.78 on Nov. 17, its lowest level since April, before recovering to $93,426.16, up 1.3% in 24 hours.

The outflow wave crested on Nov. 13, when $866.7 million exited the funds in the second-worst single-day retreat on record, according to Farside Investors data. BlackRock’s IBIT bore the brunt of the following day, posting its steepest daily loss at $463.1 million.

IBIT alone accounts for nearly $1.6 billion of the month’s total redemptions.

Transmission mechanism

ETF flows translate directly into spot demand through the authorized participant creation and redemption process. When capital enters an ETF, APs must buy or source underlying Bitcoin to deliver to the fund’s custodian, generating real spot purchases.

Creation demand beyond natural sell pressure tightens the circulating supply and lifts the clearing price. The reverse holds: redemptions force funds to sell Bitcoin or unwind hedges, pressuring spot markets lower.

This mechanism operates through channels that bypass retail crypto exchanges. Retirement accounts, registered investment advisors, and wirehouse platforms funnel institutional capital that otherwise wouldn’t touch on-chain markets.

When these allocators reverse course, they remove a structural bid that had absorbed miner issuance and other cyclical supply.

Daily mining output sits around 450 BTC post-halving, and sustained net buying above that rate creates negative net new supply, a condition that typically supports price appreciation.

Additionally, timing matters. APs execute Bitcoin purchases during US market hours around share creations, while public flow data is published after the close.

Some participants hedge with CME futures before sourcing spot, fragmenting intraday price discovery between the derivatives and cash markets. Price movements can precede headline flow figures by hours.

Broader context and price dynamics

Flows don’t operate in isolation. Bitcoin can rally on outflow days if offshore leverage expands or other buyer cohorts emerge.

Conversely, inflows don’t guarantee gains if macro risk, dollar strength, or liquidations dominate.

However, over multi-week periods, persistent redemptions signal eroding durable demand and lower the price floor needed to attract sellers.

Bitcoin’s 18.6% monthly drawdown to $89,253.78 tracks the scale of ETF capital flight. The funds had functioned as a steady source of fiat-native demand, absorbing spot supply and reducing float available for sale.

November’s reversal removes that support structure precisely as miners continue producing 450 BTC daily and the market digests prior inflows that had pushed Bitcoin above $111,000 earlier in the month.

The $2.57 billion exit represents the first sustained test of whether ETF demand can stabilize during volatility or if these vehicles amplify drawdowns when allocators rotate out.

IBIT’s $1.6 billion in redemptions alone exceeds the total monthly outflows recorded in any prior period, concentrating the exodus in the largest and most liquid fund.

Although Bitcoin’s recovery above $93,000 demonstrates some buying interest at lower levels, the month’s cumulative damage reflects the withdrawal of structural demand that had underpinned the asset’s climb through 2024 and early 2025.

Mt. Gox-linked Bitcoin (BTC) wallets moved roughly 10,600 BTC on Nov. 17, breaking an eight-month silence that had lulled traders into forgetting the estate still controlled nearly $3 billion in legacy coins.

The transaction routed about 10,608 BTC to a new, unlabeled address, with the remainder returning to a known Mt. Gox wallet.

Timing turned the routine shuffle into a headline: Bitcoin had just broken below $90,000, and the move landed like a spark on dry tinder, reviving fears that creditor distributions would dump spot supply into an already weakening market.

However, the reaction outran the evidence, as no coins appeared at exchange deposit addresses. The trustee announced there would be no new payout wave.

Late October brought a year-long extension of the repayment deadline to Oct. 31, 2026, with a disclosure that base, early lump-sum, and intermediate repayments had ended, but only for creditors who had completed eligibility steps.

That schedule undermines the notion that the Nov. 17 transfer signals imminent selling. Internal wallet reorganizations have preceded past distribution batches, yet they don’t, by themselves, add spot supply.

Until coins flow to exchange clusters or counterparties confirm receipt, the move reads as estate housekeeping against an extended timeline.

Remaining overhang

Arkham-tracked wallets tied to the Mt. Gox estate still hold about 34,689 BTC, roughly $3.2 billion at current prices, after a year of phased distributions that began in 2024.

The original rehabilitation pool comprised about 142,000 BTC, 143,000 BCH, and roughly ¥69 billion in cash. By March 2025, about 19,500 creditors had received some repayment through exchanges such as Kraken and Bitstamp.

A sizable but finite residue remains, and its release cadence follows administrative progress rather than trading conditions.

The extended deadline matters because it removes urgency. Creditors who missed earlier cutoffs or failed to finalize paperwork now have another year to sort logistics with their chosen exchange or custodian.

The trustee operates under court supervision, not market timing, which means the remaining 35,000 BTC will trickle out as eligibility resolves rather than flooding exchanges in response to price weakness.

Past distributions followed months of quiet wallet shuffling before coins actually reached recipients, a pattern that makes Monday’s move look procedural rather than distributive.

Why markets overreacted

Bitcoin dropped below $90,000 before the Mt. Gox transfer surfaced, pressured by US spot ETF gross outflows that have already reached $3.7 billion in November and broader risk-off sentiment.

The estate’s move arrived in that backdrop, and traders reflexively linked the two.

Mt. Gox has conditioned markets to expect sell pressure whenever its wallets stir, a Pavlovian response built on years of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The estate’s creditors are a heterogeneous group: some held through a decade-long bankruptcy, others bought claims at steep discounts and may sell immediately upon receipt. At the same time, long-term holders could treat distributions as tax-loss-harvesting opportunities or as portfolio rebalancing.

That mix makes the supply impact hard to model, which feeds uncertainty and amplifies fear during drawdowns.

Yet the logic that drove panic in prior years, that 140,000 BTC would hit spot markets all at once, no longer applies.

The estate has already distributed the majority of its holdings. What remains is about 24% of the original pool, spread across creditors on different timelines, governed by a process that prioritizes administrative compliance over market conditions.

The trustee extended the deadline precisely because coordination with exchanges and individual creditors takes time, not because 35,000 BTC will dump in one block.

What decides the outcome

The residual overhang is real, but its impact depends on velocity and destination.

If the remaining 35,000 BTC flow to creditors who immediately deposit to exchanges and sell, that’s roughly 78 days of current daily mining issuance hitting spot markets.

However, history shows that prices might experience only a slight fluctuation in a complete dump scenario.

If distributions continue trickling over 12 months, and half the recipients hold rather than liquidate, the marginal impact shrinks to background noise against ETF flows, miner production, and offshore leverage. The estate’s extension to October 2026 suggests the latter.

The Nov. 17 move doesn’t answer which path plays out, but it also doesn’t prove imminent selling.
The transfer went to an unlabeled wallet under apparent trustee control, not to Kraken, Bitstamp, or any counterparty that could distribute to end creditors.

Until exchange deposit addresses light up or the trustee announces a new batch, the activity fits the pattern of internal reorganization that has accompanied past payouts: preparatory, not distributive.

Bitcoin’s break below $90,000 reflects ETF redemptions, macro risk, and positioning unwinds, not Mt. Gox supply. Traders seized on the wallet move because it offered a narrative for a selloff already in progress.

But the schedule, the transfer destination, and the trustee’s own disclosures all point away from immediate pressure. The overhang will resolve over quarters, not days, and the latest move is housekeeping, not a starting gun.