Down She Goes

After failing to hold the critical $98,500 level, BTC has dropped down below $95,000 intraday so far. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino tweeted “Bitcoin black friday” this morning, not a tweet anyone wants to see from such a prominent figure in the industry. While 10/10 was an epic leverage flush and destroyer of altcoins, this move seems more risk oriented as the market has not been overlevered, and had seen some slow declines in open interest over the course of this week. It has felt like thin ice all week, with bad press and general sentiment in the US quite downtrodden. Several accounts on X also were claiming that Strategy (NASADQ: MSTR | MSTR Price Prediction) had transferred thousands of bitcoin to be sold on exchange, and that the “death spiral” was beginning. While Strategy is trading around 1 mNAV or near it, this is not quite the case yet, despite the bears chanting into the void on X with their pitch forks. Michael Saylor confirmed this wasn’t true, and that they would be announcing their recent bitcoin purchases on Monday, and that they are “buying a lot of bitcoin”.

Second leading cryptocurrency, Ethereum, saw some minutes at the $3,000 handle earlier today, but has since recovered back up over $3,100. Yesterday saw about $270m in ETH ETF outflows, putting more downward pressure on the market. Funding rates for perpetual futures are subdued on ETH around 5% annualized, but not negative quite yet. End of month option expiries for ETH on Deribit (28NOV2025) are seeing high volume on the call side between strikes at $3,100 to $3,500, along with high put volume from strikes at $2,600 to $3,100. Some strategic hedging going on in the books. 

Is this a healthy drawdown, or the beginning of something else?