Whales quietly moved back into buy mode over the past two weeks — even as the crypto market endured one of its harshest single-day liquidation waves in recent memory.
The shock came around Friday’s Deribit options expiry. Traders settled 24,838 March contracts with a combined notional value of $1.72 billion, and Bitcoin landed squarely on the $70,000 strike — the textbook “max pain” level where the greatest number of options expire worthless. That concentration of open interest effectively pinned BTC to a narrow trading band, with market participants expecting price to hold between roughly $69,000 and $71,000 until contracts finish settling.
“Max pain” isn’t accidental: when option open interest is heavily clustered at a strike, market dynamics often drive the price toward that level as expiry approaches, allowing option sellers (typically institutional market makers) to minimize payouts.
Price action underlined the squeeze. Bitcoin slipped about 1.4% from midnight Thursday to settle near $70,000 as derivatives desks monitored the expiry closely.
Liquidations were extensive. Over a 24-hour stretch, 141,810 traders were liquidated for total losses of roughly $541 million. The breakdown favors the short side of the market’s pain: leveraged long positions absorbed about $443 million (≈80% of total liquidations), while shorts lost about $97 million.
Key liquidation figures:
- Bitcoin: $191 million wiped out
- Ether: $165 million wiped out
- Single-largest loss: an $18 million ETH/USDT position on the Aster exchange
A time-based view shows how the damage accumulated: liquidations were relatively modest in a one-hour snapshot ($18 million), jumped to $126 million across four hours, and surged to $300 million over 12 hours — driven almost entirely by buyers using leverage who were caught off-side by the move.
Other market metrics pointed to capital leaving the space. Futures open interest fell 5.6% to approximately $107 billion overall. Ether futures activity dropped 9% while ETH spot fell about 6%, suggesting more than mere price adjustment — traders were pulling capital out. Funding rates for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and BNB flipped negative, signaling renewed demand for short exposure and a shift in market sentiment.
Still, the quieter story beneath the chaos is that large wallets have been accumulating — a dynamic that could matter as the market digests the expiry fallout and funding-driven flows cool off.
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