- Bitcoin has fallen roughly 19% in the past week to a low of $60,000.
- Futures open interest has dropped to $49 billion from $61 billion in just one week.
- The selloff has been driven by deleveraging rather than a single liquidation event.
Bitcoin price crash isn’t triggered by a single catastrophic event.
Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, identified the five key factors that pulled the top crypto to $60,000 on Thursday.
The list reveals a market under siege from multiple directions.
Collapsing leverage, miners forced to sell, AI hype unravelling, quantum computing risks, and the typical four-year boom-bust cycle patterns that Bitcoin investors expect and sell into.
But unlike past crashes with clear culprits — FTX imploding, China’s mining ban, Terra’s collapse — this selloff has no single trigger.
That makes it harder to call a bottom, but it can also create a cleaner setup for a recovery, Sigel said.
Massive deleveraging
Bitcoin futures open interest has plummeted to about $49 billion today from roughly $61 billion one week ago, according to Coinglass data.
That’s a decline of more than 20% in borrowed bets against Bitcoin.
Open interest reveals how much borrowed money is being bet on Bitcoin’s price movements and indicates whether investors are getting more aggressive or pulling back from risk.
More dramatically, futures open interest peaked above $90 billion in early October, meaning the market has now shed over 45% of peak leverage.
Bitcoin’s price has declined by a similar amount over the same period.
That parallel drop suggests leverage and price fell together, rather than triggering a chaotic collapse in which forced selling spirals out of control.
Over the past week, crypto markets experienced approximately $3 to $4 billion in total liquidations, with an estimated $2 to $2.5 billion concentrated in Bitcoin futures, according to Coinglass.
AI trade collapse
Investors are now questioning whether companies like OpenAI and cloud providers can actually execute and profit from their massive infrastructure spending plans, Sigel argued.
Investors are questioning AI because the returns on tens of billions spent on infrastructure remain uncertain, and monetisation is still a bit murky.
That scepticism has hit Bitcoin miners particularly hard.
Many mining companies pivoted to AI and high-performance computing, betting they could repurpose their facilities and capitalise on the AI boom.
But, as financing dried up and Bitcoin prices fell, miners had to rush out to sell Bitcoin to raise cash and keep their operations running.
“As financing conditions tightened alongside Bitcoin weakness, miners faced increased pressure to sell Bitcoin to bolster balance sheets, adding incremental spot supply during a fragile market moment,” Sigel wrote.
But the timing couldn’t be worse. Miners are dumping Bitcoin to fund AI pivots just as those AI bets look increasingly shaky.
Governance concerns resurface
The Trump family’s World Liberty Finance project has sparked new concerns about transparency in crypto after they sold a significant stake to UAE-linked investors.
A Wall Street Journal report on January 31 revealed that the crypto project sold nearly half of World Liberty Finance for an undisclosed $500 million to a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family around the time that Donald Trump took office in January 2025.
“Ironically, these are precisely the types of issues the Clarity Act is designed to address through standardized disclosure and reporting requirements, which would reduce uncertainty and improve market confidence,” Sigel wrote.
Quantum computing fears
The threat surrounding quantum computing has also reached a fever pitch.
“Investor interest in the topic has increased, and discussion across developer and community forums has become more active, even as several Bitcoin Core developers continue to downplay the immediacy of these risks,” Sigel said.
Quantum computers are machines with enough power to break Bitcoin’s encryption model. Anywhere between 20% and 50% of circulating coins are at risk, according to a report from Chaincode Labs.
Sigel noted an irony, however. Stocks of quantum computing companies have also crashed alongside Bitcoin and other risk assets.
Four-year cycle psychology
Every four years, Bitcoin has followed a strict yet unofficial schedule.
Bitcoin’s halving event reduces the issuance of new coins, which typically triggers a rise in prices after.. As prices increase, investors take profits, and the price slams into a bear market.
“The four-year cycle narrative remains an important reference point for investor psychology,” Sigel wrote.
But the path from peak to trough is rarely linear.
Past cycles have produced multiple moments after a crash when investors buy up new coins that proved durable enough to support sizable counter-trend rallies.
To be sure, many market watchers claimed that the four-year cycle was over.
Despite the five negative factors, Sigel sees opportunity.
“The depth of the drawdown and the degree of leverage reset have made the current price washout increasingly attractive for building positions on a one- to two-year view,” Sigel wrote.
“I’ve been adding to spot Bitcoin today.”
Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.
