Bitcoin's Two-Act Meltdown: Which Investors Blinked at the $60K Spike?

Bitcoin’s dramatic dip down to about $60,000 wasn’t a single lightning strike — it was more like a two-act soap opera where different groups of investors waved the white flag at different times. The awful-looking wick grabbed headlines, but the real story lives on-chain: who sold, when they bought, and why they finally gave up.

Act I and Act II: Two different groups, two different surrenders

Think of coins as students in a class labeled by the year they showed up. The “class of 2025” and the “class of 2026” behaved very differently. In November 2025, when Bitcoin slid toward roughly $80,000, most of the pain was taken by the class of 2025 — folks who’d been stuck in a sideways market for months and finally decided the boredom had become unbearable. That stretch wasn’t a sudden purge so much as exhaustion-by-calendar: time pain turned into price pain and people sold to stop the bleeding.

Then came February, and the cast changed. The sell-off down to about $60,000 pulled in a roughly even mix of exhausted 2025 holders and newer 2026 buyers who thought they were scooping up the bottom in the $80K–$98K “bear-flag” area. In plain English: some seasoned holders sold because they’d missed the chance to de-risk at higher levels, and lots of newly minted buyers hit the eject button when their conviction met a second, uglier leg down.

The on-chain stats are blunt. Short-term holders recorded roughly $1.14 billion in losses in a single day, while long-term holders took about $225 million the same day. If you look only at realized losses, both the November and February events exceeded about $2 billion per day at their peaks. Netting losses against profit-taking, the worst stretches saw a net realized-loss flow around $1.5 billion per day. In other words: people weren’t politely handing coins over — they were slamming the eject switch en masse.

Why the wick isn’t the whole point — and what comes next

The $60K wick looks dramatic, but bottoms are processes, not single candles. There are a few handy anchors to understand where we sit: the network’s realized price (the average on-chain cost basis) sits near $55,000, while the broader market mean is around $79,400. The wick also landed close to the 200-week moving average, another long-term level traders watch. Bottom-building tends to happen in the space between these kinds of cost-basis anchors — not always at a single magic number.

Volume behavior backs up the “this was a tradeable capitulation” story. Spot volume rose to roughly $15.4 billion per day; ETF weekly trades hit about $45.6 billion; futures exploded to over $107 billion per day from roughly $62 billion; options activity doubled to around $12 billion per day, with a big chunk tied to a major ETF product (pushing some venues above competitors that typically handle about $4 billion daily). In short: every market venue was involved — spot, ETFs, futures, options — and that’s what a real capitulation looks like.

So what now? The market’s next act is digestion. Expect realized-loss pressure to cool, price action to spend more time between cost-basis anchors, and a gradual rebuilding of risk appetite — earned through calm, not forced by headlines. Two capitulations don’t promise a clean, upward rocket; they do, however, show which cohorts have already been cleaned out and which hands might still wobble at the next stress test. In a market obsessed with single-candle folklore, the seller map is the sturdier takeaway.