November 2025 · MARKETS
Let me tell you something I’ve learned the hard, expensive way: every crypto bull market ends in more or less the same fashion. Not with a gentle, dignified fade, but suddenly — the floor simply vanishing beneath everyone’s feet at once. And the trapdoor is always built from the same material. Leverage. The very thing that magnifies the gains on the way up turns around, without a flicker of sentiment, and magnifies the losses on the way down.
October 2025 handed us the clearest demonstration of that in years, and I think it’s worth understanding properly — not to frighten you, but to arm you.
A room all leaning one way
By early October, Bitcoin had climbed to around $126,000, carried there by genuine institutional money and a kindly run of macro conditions. On the surface, glorious. Underneath, though, the market had quietly become brittle in a way that always makes me nervous. Funding rates on perpetual futures — a wonderfully nerdy little number that tells you which way the crowd is leaning — were deeply positive, which is a polite way of saying that almost everybody was piled onto the same side of the boat, betting the same direction. Open interest, the total value of all those outstanding derivative bets, had swollen to record levels. It was a room packed wall to wall with people all leaning the same way, and rooms like that only need one good shove.
The shove from outside
The shove, when it came, arrived outside crypto entirely. A fresh burst of US tariff threats — including the prospect of 100% duties on Chinese imports — collided with China’s own move to tighten controls on rare-earth exports, and global markets lurched into risk-off mode almost in unison. Stocks tumbled hard. But in crypto, with all that leverage stacked up, the fall didn’t just happen — it fed on itself. Falling prices led to automatic liquidations of borrowed positions, and each wave of forced selling drove prices lower still, which ignited the next wave, and the next. This is the liquidation cascade — the grim little chain reaction that crypto has faithfully re-enacted in every serious downturn I can remember. Around three-quarters of the damage detonated in a single narrow window on the evening of the tenth, an event the market now calls “10/10,” made worse by a stablecoin briefly losing its footing and some exchanges creaking under the sheer strain.
Whodunit — and why it barely matters
Now, who or what was truly to blame became its own noisy soap opera. Binance’s co-CEO Richard Teng, speaking at Consensus Hong Kong in February 2026, argued the whole thing was a macro shock rather than any failure of his own exchange — pointing out, not unreasonably, that liquidations hit every venue at once, centralised and decentralised alike, while US equities shed a jaw-dropping $1.5 trillion the same day. His rivals and a great many burnt traders saw it rather differently, accusing exchanges of engineering the very conditions that forced the selling. The finger-pointing, frankly, is still going. But here’s the thing I’d gently steer you away from: the blame game is the least useful part of this story.
Because whoever lit the match, the reason the fire spread so fast is the part that actually matters to you and me — and it never changes. Leverage was the accelerant. It always is.
The lesson is worth keeping
Did 10/10 kill crypto? No. The market picked itself up, dusted itself down, and carried on — though, if I’m honest with you, the fragility it exposed didn’t politely vanish either; the pressure kept surfacing in the months that followed. What 10/10 really was, I think, is the clearest possible lesson in something I keep coming back to, and something I devote a whole chapter to — Module 9 — in my Advanced Crypto Investing Manual: derivatives cut both ways, funding rates are a quiet early-warning bell worth listening for, and any position size you’ve built on the comfortable assumption of smooth, orderly price action will betray you at precisely the worst possible moment.
If you want proof that some corners of this market put their heads down and survive these brutal shakeouts, I’ve written about exactly that over here. Survival, it turns out, tends to belong to the ones who never overreached in the first place.
Where to stand
So no, I’m not telling you to fear the trapdoor. I’m telling you to know exactly where it is — and to stand, calmly, somewhere it can’t open beneath you.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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