Wall Street’s most famous ETH bull offered a few explanations for today’s crash—two of them have nothing to do with crypto.
BitMine chairman Tom Lee said Bitcoin’s drop to around $62,000 and Ethereum’s fall to around $1,711 on Sunday may have been driven by several overlapping sources of selling pressure. Two are worth taking a closer look at:
1. AI stocks fell first, and crypto was sold to cover margin calls. When AI and semiconductor stocks like Nvidia drop, leveraged retail investors in Asia—especially in South Korea and Taiwan—can face margin calls. The only assets they can turn into cash immediately are crypto, which trades 24/7, so they have to sell crypto first to meet those calls.
2. Some investors are raising cash ahead of Anthropic’s IPO. Anthropic is set to list on Nasdaq on November 19 (ticker: ANT). Many institutional and retail investors are selling stocks and crypto they hold to build up cash for the offering, and that cash drain is putting direct pressure on the market.
Let’s be clear: Lee himself stressed that these are only possible explanations, not confirmed causes. The roughly $2 billion in liquidations over 24 hours and nearly $3 billion in net outflows from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs between October 30 and November 13 are real figures; no one can say for certain which source of selling pressure was the biggest.
This whale’s view is that the two explanations have something in common: this downturn didn’t originate on-chain. Crypto is paying the bill for other markets this time—when U.S. stocks trigger margin calls or an IPO drains cash, crypto gets sold first. So any rebound will depend on how U.S. stocks are doing: selling in AI stocks needs to ease and margin calls need to stop before pressure on crypto might let up. And don’t forget one more thing: the person saying this still holds around 6.07 million ETH, so of course he’d like you to believe this is just a liquidity issue and not the end of the bull market.$BTC $ETH
BitMine chairman Tom Lee said Bitcoin’s drop to around $62,000 and Ethereum’s fall to around $1,711 on Sunday may have been driven by several overlapping sources of selling pressure. Two are worth taking a closer look at:
1. AI stocks fell first, and crypto was sold to cover margin calls. When AI and semiconductor stocks like Nvidia drop, leveraged retail investors in Asia—especially in South Korea and Taiwan—can face margin calls. The only assets they can turn into cash immediately are crypto, which trades 24/7, so they have to sell crypto first to meet those calls.
2. Some investors are raising cash ahead of Anthropic’s IPO. Anthropic is set to list on Nasdaq on November 19 (ticker: ANT). Many institutional and retail investors are selling stocks and crypto they hold to build up cash for the offering, and that cash drain is putting direct pressure on the market.
Let’s be clear: Lee himself stressed that these are only possible explanations, not confirmed causes. The roughly $2 billion in liquidations over 24 hours and nearly $3 billion in net outflows from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs between October 30 and November 13 are real figures; no one can say for certain which source of selling pressure was the biggest.
This whale’s view is that the two explanations have something in common: this downturn didn’t originate on-chain. Crypto is paying the bill for other markets this time—when U.S. stocks trigger margin calls or an IPO drains cash, crypto gets sold first. So any rebound will depend on how U.S. stocks are doing: selling in AI stocks needs to ease and margin calls need to stop before pressure on crypto might let up. And don’t forget one more thing: the person saying this still holds around 6.07 million ETH, so of course he’d like you to believe this is just a liquidity issue and not the end of the bull market.$BTC $ETH
