Bitcoin Falls Below $80,000, Traders Call It Buying

Long Bets Paid the Liquidation Bill

A margin call forces the trade. The exchange picks the moment; the trader only watches. KuCoin News counted $291 million in crypto liquidations in the hour that ended at 15:32:51 UTC on Oct. 24². Long positions, bets on a climb, made up $274 million of that figure. Short positions, bets on a further drop, made up just $17.33 million.

Bitcoin itself traded at $79,902.50 at that moment, down 2.23 percent on the day². One side of the leverage book absorbed almost the whole hour's damage. Long traders outnumbered short sellers by roughly sixteen to one among the liquidated.

TokenPost's own tally of the same hour matched KuCoin's total within a rounding error. Bitcoin alone accounted for $86.79 million of the damage, and Ether added $69.8 million, TokenPost reported from the same data³. Smaller tokens traders had also leveraged made up the remaining $134 million.

A forced sale settles a debt. Demand stays a separate question, one that hour's numbers leave open. Every long position closed that hour belonged to a trader who had borrowed against a bet. The bet failed before the trader chose to fold it.

Four Posts Raced the Story

A wallet tracker watches the blockchain ledger and posts the moment a transfer clears a size threshold it sets. Anyone can read the same ledger; the tracker's job is finding the move fast and naming whose wallet made it. Lookonchain moved first, a full day earlier. The wallet-tracking account posted at 03:34 UTC on Oct. 23: “Whales are accumulating $BTC! Since Oct 1, 40 newly created wallets have withdrawn 9,458 $BTC ($771.5M) from #Wintermute”⁴.

Ash Crypto picked up the thread Friday morning. “HUGE: Whales have accumulated $780 Million in $BTC this month. Smart money is buying fear,” the trader posted at 05:51 UTC⁶. The figure ran $8.5 million above Lookonchain's own count, a gap crypto.news flagged as it compared the two posts⁵.

Lucky weighed in next, pointing the other way. KuCoin News, citing the on-chain researcher MetaEra, had logged a separate flow hours earlier⁸. Some 32,380 BTC, equal to about $2.6 billion, had moved into exchanges in a single day at 02:42 UTC. KuCoin called it the largest such inflow since April. “Whales are moving serious size in $BTC again, and the timing is worth watching... The last time we saw numbers like these, Bitcoin topped out just a few weeks later. I'm not saying we're about to see the same thing happen again, but when billions are moving and history gives us a similar setup, it's hard to ignore,” Lucky wrote at 09:40 UTC⁷.

Four accounts, four framings, one afternoon. A reader scrolling X by 15:00 UTC on Friday had already seen two framings of Bitcoin's drop. One called it accumulation. The other called it a warning, hours before the hour's own liquidation tally even printed.

What the Withdrawn Wallets Actually Show

Wintermute supplies the liquidity much of the crypto market trades against. Evgeny Gaevoy founded the firm in London in July 2017 with Harro Mantel and Yoann Turpin, and it still runs from there today¹⁰. A wallet that pulls coins off Wintermute's books takes them out of a market maker's active inventory. That is the pattern Lookonchain flagged⁴.

crypto.news checked that pattern against its own record and found gaps the headline skipped⁵. The 40 wallets Lookonchain tracked stay anonymous to any reporter who checked them. That $771.5 million figure works out to $81,571 per coin at Friday's rate, a figure the transfers alone leave unconfirmed. A single firm moving funds through several wallets at once would look, on this measure, exactly like 40 separate buyers.

The $2.6 billion inflow cuts against the same story on its own terms. More bitcoin reached exchanges in one day than left Wintermute across three weeks. An exchange deposit raises the odds of a sale; a market maker's withdrawal raises the odds of a hold. Both happened within 36 hours of each other, and each one found an advocate willing to read it as proof.

Sharma Answers the Buying Claim

Vik Sharma runs Cake Wallet, a self-custody bitcoin wallet. He answered the same question a day earlier, as Bitcoin dipped toward $81,387 during an overlapping sell-off on Oct. 23. That day's liquidations ran $407 million, and $355 million of them hit long positions, the same pattern Friday's hour would repeat⁹. Stocks fell alongside bitcoin that day even as bond yields slid, a combination Sharma called a warning rather than an invitation.

“Lower yields can reflect worries about growth just as easily as expectations of easier policy, and I would not assume the move points to a guaranteed rally for digital assets. Bitcoin trades on liquidity and risk appetite in the short term, so weakness in both can persist even with rates moving lower,” Sharma told Cryptowisser⁹. He drew a second distinction few traders bothered to make Friday. “I would also keep bond yields distinct from Fed policy rates; a fall in market yields is not the same thing as a Fed rate cut. We cannot call a bottom from a single event, and downside remains possible if risk appetite keeps deteriorating,” he said.

Sharma's point lands squarely on Friday's posts. Lookonchain and Ash Crypto read a wallet movement as proof of demand. Sharma reads the same kind of movement as one data point among many, worth tracking but incapable of settling the question alone. A trader who wants an answer gets two readings of the identical ledger and a choice about which one to trust.

Bitcoin's price on Friday afternoon carried the one fact both camps agreed on. It fell. Whether that fall counted as an entry point or a warning depended entirely on which post landed in a trader's feed first. It also depended on how much weight a reader gave a wallet count that named itself but left its buyer anonymous.

By the numbers

• The Kobeissi Letter's post put the hour's damage at $200 million in leveraged Bitcoin and Ether positions¹.
• KuCoin News counted $291 million in total crypto liquidations in the hour ending 15:32:51 UTC on Oct. 24, 2026².
• Long positions made up $274 million of that hour's liquidations, 94 percent of the total².
• Short positions made up the remaining $17.33 million².
• Bitcoin traded at $79,902.50 at 15:32:51 UTC on Oct. 24, 2026, down 2.23 percent on the day².
• Forty wallets withdrew 9,458 BTC worth $771.5 million from Wintermute between Oct. 1 and Oct. 23, 2026⁴⁵.
• KuCoin News reported a separate $2.6 billion inflow to exchanges in a single day, the largest since April⁸.
• The Kobeissi Letter's post drew 3,178 likes and 235 replies and quote posts, counted at 16:30 UTC on Oct. 24, 2026¹.

What to watch

Watch Wintermute's wallets for a second week of the same withdrawal pace; a one-time pull reads differently than a trend. Exchange deposit trackers deserve the same attention. A repeat of Friday's $2.6 billion inflow would weigh against the accumulation story more than any single post argued for it. Sharma's own standard gives any reader a plain test to run. A single day's wallet movement, alone, settles little. The next several sessions of both flows together will tell the sturdier story.

Sources

1. The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter), Post on X, Oct. 24, 2026, https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2114006499248816421
2. KuCoin News, "BTC Drops Below $80,000; $291 Million in Liquidations Within One Hour," KuCoin News, Oct. 24, 2026, https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/btc-falls-below-80-000-291m-in-liquidations-in-1-hour
3. Enna Lee, "Bitcoin Falls Below $80,000 as Crypto Liquidations Reach $291 Million," TokenPost, Oct. 24, 2026, https://www.tokenpost.com/news/investing/40089
4. Lookonchain (@lookonchain), Post on X, Oct. 23, 2026, https://x.com/lookonchain/status/2113474142620340393
5. Lawrence Mondal, "Bitcoin whales move $771.5M from Wintermute as buying claims spread," crypto.news, Oct. 24, 2026, https://crypto.news/bitcoin-whales-780m-wintermute-withdrawals/
6. Ash Crypto (@AshCrypto), Post on X, Oct. 24, 2026, https://x.com/AshCrypto/status/2113870853859668316
7. Lucky (@LLuciano_BTC), Post on X, Oct. 24, 2026, https://x.com/LLuciano_BTC/status/2113928536704843939
8. KuCoin News, "Approximately $2.6 billion in BTC flows into exchanges in a single day, the largest since April," KuCoin News, Oct. 24, 2026, https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/approximately-2-6-billion-btc-flows-into-exchanges-in-single-day-largest-since-april
9. Hassan Maishera, "Bitcoin Falls Below $82k as Tech Selloff Triggers $407 Million in Crypto Liquidations," Cryptowisser, Oct. 23, 2026, https://www.cryptowisser.com/news/bitcoin-falls-below-82k-as-407m-in-leveraged-bets-get-wiped-out/
10. MarketsWiki, "Wintermute," MarketsWiki, retrieved Oct. 24, 2026, https://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/Wintermute