Bitcoin recorded its strongest rebound since breaking below 100,000 dollars a month ago, firmly stabilizing above 93,000 after erasing most of Monday’s heavy losses.
Bitcoin’s rise yesterday reflected a rare alignment of supportive factors. According to market flows, futures traders stepped in aggressively as volatility spiked and equities regained traction, while pockets of opportunistic buying emerged.
The rebound was helped by easing long liquidation pressure, allowing bitcoin to stage a recovery that was more technical than fundamental.
Still, the structure of the rebound remains fragile. Data from SoSo Value shows that US spot bitcoin ETFs attracted less than 70 million dollars of inflows across Monday and Tuesday, a strikingly weak response for such a deep selloff.
Spot liquidity echoed the same tone, with on-balance volume on Coinbase barely lifting from recent lows, signalling that genuine accumulation is still absent.
Futures markets drove the move instead. CoinGlass reported that futures open interest jumped more than 7% today to 134 billion dollars, rising by roughly 12 billion from the November trough. When derivatives outperform spot and ETF flows so decisively, the recovery tends to be speculative and algorithmic, rather than the start of a durable uptrend. The bounce came after reaching a key bullish order block between $84.5K-$83.4K.
Whale behaviour adds another layer of uncertainty. BGeometrics data shows that the count of addresses holding 1,000 to 10,000 BTC rose slightly to 1,923, but the figure remains 39 lower than a week ago, pointing to ongoing distribution rather than conviction buying.
Whale activity could be the deciding factor in the upcoming days. If we do not see a significant accumulation by whales to absorb the existing circulating supply, Bitcoin’s recovery might remain limited and prone to an even larger pullback as leverage continues to unwind.
The next catalyst may come from the institutional side, and we will see how it might attract more player to the market. Vanguard will now allow trading of crypto ETFs and mutual funds on its platform, opening access to more than 50 million brokerage clients overseeing over 11 trillion dollars. While the firm will not launch its own products, the shift signals an acknowledgment that crypto has become too large to ignore, even after a trillion-dollar drawdown.
