Solid catch on that open interest buildup noticing when smart money establishes that scale of short positioning across derivatives books is usually where retail gets completely blindsided. The comparison to the October '25 drawdown is completely valid too, especially given how funding rates have been drifting neutral-to-negative and spot CVD isn't aggressively absorbing the passive sell limit walls. Watching cluster size at key liquidation levels right now definitely points to an inflection window where volatility has to resolve sharply one way or the other. However, leaning too heavily into an exact repeat of that 23% correction feels like recency bias blinding traders to actual structural changes in the order book. When a whale-sized short is this glaringly obvious on publicly aggregated dashboards, it often acts as liquidity bait for prime market makers rather than genuine directional conviction. If large spot buyers step in to defend key volume shelves, the delta imbalance will rapidly flip against them, turning an anticipated dump into a violent short squeeze that sweeps stop clusters above local range highs. Treating it as a guaranteed flush before seeing spot-driven follow-through is just asking to get chopped up $BTC
