Whale wallets quietly shifted to buying mode over the past two weeks — even as the broader crypto market absorbed one of its worst single-day liquidation events in recent memory.
A Massive Options Expiry Freezes The Price
Friday’s settlement of Deribit’s March options contracts has effectively put Bitcoin on hold. The expiry involves 24,838 contracts with a combined notional value of $1.72 billion, and BTC has landed squarely at the $70,000 strike — the exact level known as “max pain,” where the greatest number of options contracts expire worthless.
That pins price in a tight band. Traders expect it to hold between $69,000 and $71,000 until contracts settle later today.
Max pain is not a coincidence. It describes the point where option sellers — typically institutional market makers — collect maximum losses from buyers.
When open interest is concentrated enough, the market tends to drift toward that level as expiry approaches, and that appears to be exactly what happened this week.
Bitcoin fell about 1.4% from midnight Thursday, landing at $70,000 by the time derivatives traders were watching closely.
Longs Got Crushed While Shorts Walked Away
The damage across the broader market was severe. Data shows 141,810 traders were liquidated over a 24-hour stretch, with total losses reaching $541 million.
Long positions — bets that prices would rise — accounted for $443 million of that, or roughly 80% of the total. Short sellers, by contrast, lost only $97 million.
Bitcoin led the wreckage at $191 million in liquidations. Ether followed at $165 million. The single largest loss was a $18 million ETH/USDT position on the Aster exchange, wiped out in one move.
Open Interest, Futures Down
The time breakdown tells the story clearly. The one-hour window showed relatively balanced liquidations at $18 million. But zoom out to four hours and the figure jumps to $126 million — and over 12 hours, it hit $300 million, almost entirely from leveraged buyers who got caught on the wrong side.
Futures open interest industry-wide fell 5.6% to close to $107 billion. Ether futures dropped 9% alongside a 6% decline in spot price, a combination that points to capital leaving the market outright, not just prices falling.
Funding rates for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and BNB have all turned negative, a sign that short positions are back in demand across the board.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView