Bitcoin (BTC) spent this past week ripping from the low $60,000s to just under $80,000, and to trader Nonzee, none of it looks like conviction.<\/p>\n
They are calling the move a trap built on forced buying rather than real demand, and say the next leg is down, not up.<\/p>\n
Nonzee\u2019s argument starts with the size of the squeeze, where more than $3.1 billion in short positions were wiped out during the run, and Bitcoin alone was responsible for roughly $1.65 billion of that figure. In their view<\/a>, that is what actually pushed the price higher, not a change in sentiment.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was not a reversal. It was a liquidity squeeze,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n The trader tied the timing to two catalysts: Trump putting the CLARITY Act back in the headlines and the Treasury Department increasing its long-term bond buybacks. Both, they argue, forced shorts out and pulled fresh longs into a market that was already stretched thin.<\/p>\n Their read on where things stand now is that the $70,000 fair value gap, a pricing gap left behind during an earlier fast move that traders watch for a return visit, has been filled, the short squeeze has run its course, and FOMO buying is happening in real time.<\/p>\n Next will come distribution, then the selloff, in their framing, with a downside path running from $77,000 to $67,000, then $55,000, before a final leg down to between $48,000 and $45,000.<\/p>\n Bitcoin was trading around $78,000 at the time of writing, up roughly 2% on the day and about 22% over the past week, according to CoinGecko. It has swung between $76,000 and $79,000 in the last 24 hours alone. Still, the OG crypto remains 39% below its all-time high of around $126,000, set back in October 2025, and it is still down 33% on a one-year basis despite the bounce.<\/p>\n Whether or not Nonzee\u2019s call plays out, the past several days have already been rough on traders in both directions. BTC briefly touched<\/a> almost $80,000 on Friday before slipping<\/a> to around $75,500 over the weekend, as CryptoPotato<\/em> reported, with the drop coinciding with reports that market maker Wintermute had built<\/a> a sizable short position on Hyperliquid. During that stretch, altcoins fared worse, with ETH down 5% and XRP off by more than 6%.<\/p>\n The bounce also pushed the Fear and Greed Index to its highest reading since last October\u2019s crash, a jump that has some drawing comparisons to the conditions right before that selloff wiped out billions in leveraged positions.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, HYPE printed a new all-time high above $82 even as BTC cooled off, and separately, data from analyst nocoffeenobrain shows<\/a> open interest climbing from around $22 billion to nearly $25 billion during the rally, a slower pace than the move in price itself, which points to traders adding positions cautiously rather than piling on leverage all at once.<\/p>\n The post Bitcoin\u2019s $80K Rally Is a Trap, Analyst Warns of $45K Drop<\/a> appeared first on CryptoPotato<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bitcoin (BTC) spent this past week ripping from the low $60,000s to just under $80,000, and to trader Nonzee, none of it looks like conviction. They are calling the move a trap built on forced buying rather than real demand, and say the next leg is down, not up. The Case for a Distribution Phase, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217817"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=217817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=217817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=217817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=217817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Choppy Few Days Either Way<\/h2>\n