At first glance, this move looked scary.
Gold and silver dumped nearly 10%, wiping out almost $3 trillion in value — roughly the size of the entire crypto market.
$BTC didn’t escape either. It slid close to 7%, dropping from around $89K to below $82K.
But the more I looked at it, the clearer it became:
this didn’t feel like a “new war” or “new policy” shock.
It looked like profit-taking mixed with too much leverage.
Metals had become extremely crowded trades.
50x–100x futures were stacked on top of an already extended move. Once prices dipped, margin calls kicked in — and the selling fed on itself.
Zooming out, the spillover hit everything risk-on.
CoinGlass data shows around $1.68B liquidated in 24 hours, with longs making up roughly 93% of the damage. That tells you how one-sided positioning had become.
At the same time, Bitcoin ETFs recorded about $817M in outflows, extending an eight-day outflow streak. That doesn’t scream panic to me — it signals institutions stepping back while leverage gets flushed.
Why this matters is simple.
Moves like this usually do two things:
They wipe out excess leverage fast
They reset risk across markets, not just crypto — equities included
The real question isn’t whether this drop hurt. It did.
The question is whether this was just a brutal deleveraging day, or the beginning of a broader risk-off phase.
Personally, I’m watching positioning and flows more than headlines right now.
Because when leverage clears,
the next move is usually built on something much healthier.