The phrase “recreating the early bull market of ’23” has been getting repeated more and more casually on the plaza these past few days, but very few people have clearly explained where the money came from back in March 2023.
Back then, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, and BTC climbed from around 20,000 to above 28,000 in a week, gaining nearly 40%. The driver wasn’t any positive news from within the crypto industry. Depositors in the traditional banking system were looking for an escape hatch, and funds moved straight from bank balance sheets into BTC. That was a story of fresh money coming in from outside, triggered by trouble elsewhere.
Now the starting point is exactly the opposite. The Nasdaq 100 has entered a technical correction, and BTC has followed it below 77,000. The current price is 77296.7, down 0.48% in 24 hours. This isn’t what it looks like when safe-haven money flows into BTC; it’s two assets being sold together as part of the same deleveraging chain. The correlation between BTC and the Nasdaq has never really disappeared over the years. The brief decoupling in March 2023 was an exception, not the norm. Treating an exception as a template is one of the easiest ways to learn an expensive lesson.🔄
The second thing that doesn’t add up is the positioning. On perpetuals, the 8-hour funding rate is still at the maximum tier of +0.0100%, open interest is 7.736 billion USDT, and long accounts make up 72.6%. The price has already moved lower, but the cost of holding long positions hasn’t fallen at all, and more than 70% of accounts are still on the buy side. Take a look at the funding rate history for the first quarter of 2023: it hovered around zero for a long time. Going long came at a cost and took courage. The early bull market bottom was built jointly by bears and those sitting on the sidelines. Today’s positioning says, “Everyone thinks this is the bottom.” Those are not the same thing.
The third thing to watch is volume. The 24-hour trading volume is 9.77 billion USDT, alongside a 0.48% drop. That’s a low-volume drift downward, not panic selling. Panic selling comes with a surge in volume; there’s no volume now, which means few people have really been hurt yet—and that also means the market hasn’t cleared out its positions. A genuine intermediate-term bottom is usually accompanied by a high-volume capitulation sell-off, not this quiet slide.
There’s another thing people are misreading. The most widely circulated post on the plaza claims someone opened a $20 million short position at 30x leverage, with a liquidation price of 84469. A liquidation price at 30x leverage only tells you that the position was entered above 81000; it doesn’t mean the trader knows something. What you should really be watching is the other side: 72.6% of accounts are long. If the price drops another leg, those positions will be fuel for a cascade of liquidations, and the decline will be much faster than it is now.
Recreating 2023 has never been about making the candlestick chart look similar. It’s about having a similar source of funds. Back then, money from outside was being pushed in; now it looks more like money from inside is being pushed out. The two periods might show similar sideways trading on a chart, but their positioning and capital flows are completely different.
My view is straightforward: don’t rush to use the term “early bull market” until the funding rate returns to around zero and the share of long accounts falls below 55%. If you really want to build a position, wait for a high-volume panic sell-off—it’s a more reliable signal than waiting for a particular chart pattern. There are only two indicators to watch: whether open interest drops quickly when the price falls another leg (a sign that positions are being cleared out), and whether the funding rate flips from +0.0100% to negative.
Risk warning: your liquidation price won’t move higher just because your analysis is right. Position management always comes before directional calls.
#BTC #Bitcoin #Crypto
Back then, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, and BTC climbed from around 20,000 to above 28,000 in a week, gaining nearly 40%. The driver wasn’t any positive news from within the crypto industry. Depositors in the traditional banking system were looking for an escape hatch, and funds moved straight from bank balance sheets into BTC. That was a story of fresh money coming in from outside, triggered by trouble elsewhere.
Now the starting point is exactly the opposite. The Nasdaq 100 has entered a technical correction, and BTC has followed it below 77,000. The current price is 77296.7, down 0.48% in 24 hours. This isn’t what it looks like when safe-haven money flows into BTC; it’s two assets being sold together as part of the same deleveraging chain. The correlation between BTC and the Nasdaq has never really disappeared over the years. The brief decoupling in March 2023 was an exception, not the norm. Treating an exception as a template is one of the easiest ways to learn an expensive lesson.🔄
The second thing that doesn’t add up is the positioning. On perpetuals, the 8-hour funding rate is still at the maximum tier of +0.0100%, open interest is 7.736 billion USDT, and long accounts make up 72.6%. The price has already moved lower, but the cost of holding long positions hasn’t fallen at all, and more than 70% of accounts are still on the buy side. Take a look at the funding rate history for the first quarter of 2023: it hovered around zero for a long time. Going long came at a cost and took courage. The early bull market bottom was built jointly by bears and those sitting on the sidelines. Today’s positioning says, “Everyone thinks this is the bottom.” Those are not the same thing.
The third thing to watch is volume. The 24-hour trading volume is 9.77 billion USDT, alongside a 0.48% drop. That’s a low-volume drift downward, not panic selling. Panic selling comes with a surge in volume; there’s no volume now, which means few people have really been hurt yet—and that also means the market hasn’t cleared out its positions. A genuine intermediate-term bottom is usually accompanied by a high-volume capitulation sell-off, not this quiet slide.
There’s another thing people are misreading. The most widely circulated post on the plaza claims someone opened a $20 million short position at 30x leverage, with a liquidation price of 84469. A liquidation price at 30x leverage only tells you that the position was entered above 81000; it doesn’t mean the trader knows something. What you should really be watching is the other side: 72.6% of accounts are long. If the price drops another leg, those positions will be fuel for a cascade of liquidations, and the decline will be much faster than it is now.
Recreating 2023 has never been about making the candlestick chart look similar. It’s about having a similar source of funds. Back then, money from outside was being pushed in; now it looks more like money from inside is being pushed out. The two periods might show similar sideways trading on a chart, but their positioning and capital flows are completely different.
My view is straightforward: don’t rush to use the term “early bull market” until the funding rate returns to around zero and the share of long accounts falls below 55%. If you really want to build a position, wait for a high-volume panic sell-off—it’s a more reliable signal than waiting for a particular chart pattern. There are only two indicators to watch: whether open interest drops quickly when the price falls another leg (a sign that positions are being cleared out), and whether the funding rate flips from +0.0100% to negative.
Risk warning: your liquidation price won’t move higher just because your analysis is right. Position management always comes before directional calls.
#BTC #Bitcoin #Crypto