The crypto market went through another round of wild swings in early February after Bitcoin suddenly plunged to the low-$60,000s in just a few hours on Feb. 5, dragging the rest of the market down with it, before bouncing back to near $70,000.

As of Monday morning, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap is trading around $68,860, down 3.2% in the past 24-hours and almost 12% over the past seven days.

Data from Coinglass shows more than $2 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated in that short window on Thursday, mostly made up of long bets forced to close as prices fell. That wave of automatic selling pushed the slide further than fundamentals alone would suggest.

Jeff Park, a Bitwise portfolio manager, suggested on X on Thursday evening that a lot of the indiscriminate selling seemed to come from multi-strategy hedge funds running delta-hedged trades “possibly with growth equity correlations spillovers.”

Hello from Hong Kong

Parker White, chief investment officer at DeFi Development Corporation, wrote in an X post several hours after Park that the market crash was probably triggered by the sudden collapse of Hong Kong hedge funds, as The Defiant previously reported.

Those funds held call options in IBIT, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund and one of the largest in the market, which saw about $10.7 billion in trading that day — nearly double its previous record — with roughly $900 million in options premiums changing hands.

White suggested that Asia-based hedge funds had run a leveraged IBIT options trade funded in yen, added more leverage after losses, got hit by funding costs and silver trades, and then the final Bitcoin move triggered the collapse.

“We know that Asian traders, particularly in China, have been deeply involved in the Silver and Gold trade. Silver was down 20% today, which was the 2nd largest 1 day move in a very long time (largest on Jan 30). We also know that the JPY carry trade has been unwinding at an increasingly rapid pace,” White wrote.

But if the liquidation actually happened, it won’t show up in 13F filings — quarterly reports that disclose institutional holdings — until 45 days after the quarter ends, so mid‑May is the earliest the full picture could emerge.

Tanisha Katara, founder of Katara Consulting Group, echoed the sentiment, noting in commentary for The Defiant that institutional products like ETFs can accelerate both rallies and sell-offs.

She noted that U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, which provide streamlined access to the crypto market for large financial players, are now also net sellers, showing that having a way in doesn’t guarantee long-term commitment. Katara told The Defiant:

Adding to the chaos, South Korea’s Bithumb mistakenly gave away thousands of BTC during a promotion, briefly sparking heavy local selling, though the exact amount of dumped tokens remains unclear.

As The Defiant reported earlier, users rushed to cash out their accidentally airdropped BTC and offramp funds, briefly sending the price of Bitcoin on Bithumb almost 18% below market price across other exchanges globally.

The mishap already prompted South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service to warn it will tighten oversight and impose tougher penalties on financial firms.

Further Declines Ahead

As crypto struggles, other global risk assets are also unstable. Kyle Rodda, senior financial market analyst at Capital.com, explained in commentary shared with The Defiant that “everything is the one trade in the markets right now,” with fundamentals acting more as triggers than as main drivers of daily swings.

“The week ahead will also be dominated by U.S. data, with a batch of inflation figures and Non-Farm Payrolls data released in coming days after the latter was delayed by the partial US Government shutdown. The narrative is less pronounced given the resilience of U.S. economic activity recently, but the markets continue to try and balance signs of a sluggish labour market with sticky prices,” Rodda added.

Georgii Verbitskii, founder of crypto investment app TYMIO, told The Defiant that the sell-off also reflected long-term holders trimming exposure. He noted that Bitcoin’s inflation-hedge narrative was being questioned short-term, and predicted that the market would likely go lower:

Speaking with The Defiant, Ryan Li, CEO of Surf, an AI tool built for crypto, pointed out that sentiment among retail investors is “extremely low right now, firmly in ‘extreme fear’ territory and on par with the November lows.”

Data from the Greed & Fear Index shows that even with Bitcoin bouncing back to $70,000 over the past 24 hours, investors are indeed still stuck in “extreme fear.”