Bitcoin price plummeted to $92,980 in late trading on December 5th. The move follows the same day’s all-time high when the asset hit just shy of $104,000 on Coinbase.
A 10% flash crash wiped out the BTC price by around $10,000 as another leveraged liquidation event occurred.
BREAKING: #Bitcoin at one point fell -$8,000 in 90 minutes to a daily low of $92,000.
Since then, Bitcoin has rebounded +$5,000 from its lows, but continues to trade with high volatility. pic.twitter.com/7hqeSQl1LW
— Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) December 5, 2024
BTC flash crash
The return to five digits comes as mainstream media around the world reported that Bitcoin’s milestone high had surpassed $100,000 for the first time.
“The interesting post-mortem on this move is that the ETFs didn’t follow it at all,” observed analyst ‘lowstrife’, adding:
“This was entirely a leveraged spot Bitcoin move.”
“If this is what a few degens in Asia can do, what will Saylor do to the market if (when?) they need to liquidate their coins for loan repayments?” It’s much more than this ,” he said.
“There’s just too little market making,” said Bitcoin pioneer Adam Back, adding, “Even if the 4% difference between IBIT and spot BTC is just a few minutes, come on!”
An interesting postmortem on this move is that the ETFs didn’t follow suit at all. As you can imagine, this was a completely leveraged spot Bitcoin move. pic.twitter.com/nSIFpXMsbW
— lowstrife (@lowstrife) December 5, 2024
According to Coinglass, 163,587 traders liquidated in the past 24 hours, totaling more than $900 million in inflows, 80% of which were long positions.
“Near the weekend, a sharp decline wiped out the leverage wave, but other coins did not follow suit, and the long side of the overall crypto market remains very strong,” said Greeks Live, a crypto derivatives provider.
The crash and correction sent the asset back into the range-bound channel where it has been trading since mid-November.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading around $97,600 during early Asian trading on Friday morning.
Bitcoin ETFs remain bullish
As we observed above, the spot Bitcoin ETF did not blink while the spot market was losing leverage.
The 11 U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs are seeing solid momentum, with a total of $748 million in inflows on Thursday. According to Coinglass, the BlackRock IBIT fund led the way with inflows of $751.6 million, while Grayscale’s GBTC saw outflows of $149 million.
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