Whale wallets quietly moved into buy mode over the past two weeks — even as the crypto market weathered one of its most violent single-day liquidation episodes in recent memory.
The immediate trigger was Friday’s settlement of Deribit’s March options, where 24,838 contracts with a combined notional value of $1.72 billion expired. Bitcoin landed squarely on the $70,000 strike — the so-called “max pain” level where the largest number of options expire worthless. That concentration of open interest tends to pull prices into a tight range as expiry approaches, and traders expected BTC to hold roughly between $69,000 and $71,000 until contracts settled.
Prices slipped about 1.4% from midnight Thursday, settling around $70,000 as derivatives desks watched the clock. The fallout was broad and brutal: over a 24-hour period, 141,810 traders were liquidated for a combined $541 million in losses. Long positions — bets that prices would rise — bore the brunt, accounting for roughly $443 million (about 80%) of the total, while shorts lost roughly $97 million.
Bitcoin led the carnage with $191 million in liquidations, followed by Ether at $165 million. The single largest wipeout reported was an $18 million ETH/USDT position on the Aster exchange. Looking at the timeline shows how the pain escalated: liquidations were relatively modest in a one-hour window (~$18 million), jumped to $126 million over four hours, and reached about $300 million across 12 hours — driven almost entirely by leveraged buyers caught wrong-footed.
Broader market signals also point to capital exiting. Futures open interest across the industry fell about 5.6% to roughly $107 billion. Ether futures dropped 9% as spot ETH fell about 6% — a combination that suggests outright withdrawals rather than just price repricing. Meanwhile, funding rates for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and BNB flipped negative, indicating that short positions are again in demand and traders are paying to hold them.
Despite the short-term pain in derivatives markets, on-chain behavior from large addresses suggests some market participants used the volatility as a buying opportunity. Whale wallets moving into accumulation mode over the last two weeks could provide a counterbalance to the deleveraging seen during the expiry, setting up an interesting dynamic for price action in the weeks ahead.
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