Open interest in Bitcoin futures remains subdued, and options traders have placed downside bets via put contracts targeting the $80,000 level. | Photo credit: Dado Ruvic
The native cryptocurrency fell as much as 7.4 percent, dipping below the $100,000 mark for the first time since June. That is more than 20 percent less than the record level of a month ago. Bitcoin pared losses in Asia on Wednesday morning, but is still struggling for a solid footing.
Unlike the successive wipeouts that triggered the October crash, the current decline has been led by a steady sell-off in the spot market. That marks a shift from the pattern that crypto traders have come to expect lately, where sudden bursts of volatility are typically caused by liquidations in futures markets.
Longtime Bitcoin holders sold about 400,000 Bitcoin in the past month, an exodus of about $45 billion that has thrown the market off balance, according to Markus Thielen, head of 10x Research.
Meanwhile, according to CoinGlass, about $2 billion in crypto positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours — modest compared to the $19 billion in forced liquidations that underscored last month’s crash. Open interest in Bitcoin futures remains subdued, and options traders have placed downside bets via put contracts targeting the $80,000 level.
Now that leverage is relatively subdued, attention has shifted to the legacy holders choosing to sell.
“Over 319,000 Bitcoins have been reactivated in the past month, mainly from coins held for six to 12 months – indicating significant profit-taking since mid-July,” said Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33. “While some of the reactivation comes from internal transfers, much of it reflects actual sales.”
If October’s crash had to do with foreclosures, the current downturn could reflect something more sobering: the erosion of beliefs. According to Thielen, a growing imbalance between long-time holders of Bitcoin and new buyers getting in is starting to determine the direction of the market – and not just sentiment.
Earlier this year, Thielen noted that “mega whales” – entities holding between 1,000 Bitcoin and 10,000 Bitcoin – began offloading large volumes, even as institutional players tried to absorb the supply. That helped explain Bitcoin’s choppy, sideways move over the summer. But since the Oct. 10 crash, Thielen says, the broader question has faded. “We have broken some on-chain indicators – people are underwater, they need to close their positions,” he said.
All told, accumulation by parties holding between 100 Bitcoin and 1,000 Bitcoin has fallen sharply. “The whales just aren’t buying,” he said.
Looking ahead, Thielen warns that the recession could last well into next spring. The 2021-2022 bear market saw over a million Bitcoin sold by large holders in almost a year – a scale that Thielen believes will repeat itself. “If this rate is the same,” he said, “we could see this situation continuing for another six months.”
He is not advocating a catastrophic plunge, but sees room for further declines. “I don’t believe in the cycle,” Thielen said, “but I assume we’re consolidating a little bit and possibly even dropping a little bit more. $85,000 is my maximum downside target.”
More stories like this are available at bloomberg.com
©2025 BloombergLP
Published on November 5, 2025
#Crypto #hit #Bitcoin #whales #dumping #billion #bets