Bitcoin Fell to $62,000 Overnight, Wiped Out $2 Billion in Bets, Then Bounced 6% Before Breakfast
Bitcoin fell to about $61,970 on Kraken late Saturday night, its lowest price since mid-July, and then climbed back above $66,000 within eight hours. The drop wiped out about $1.96 billion in leveraged crypto positions in 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data, and it dragged nearly everything else down with it. Ether fell to about $1,710, Solana dropped to about $67, and XRP sank to 89 cents, its lowest price since November 2024. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index printed 10 on Sunday morning, deep in extreme fear. By Sunday morning bitcoin was trading near $65,150, still down about 14 percent on the week and roughly half its October 6 record of $126,080, but the speed of the bounce was almost as striking as the fall.
Two billion dollars of bets went up in smoke
Borrowed money made the move bigger than it had to be. About $1.96 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated over a rolling 24-hour period, including roughly $750 million in bitcoin, and about $600.5 million of the bitcoin total came from traders betting on higher prices, according to CoinGlass data cited by crypto.news. A liquidation is an exchange automatically closing a borrowed bet when the trader's collateral runs short, and each forced sale can push the price lower and trigger the next one, which is why weekend drops in thin trading can turn sharp very quickly. The selling was heavy on American exchanges too: on Coinbase, bitcoin hit about $61,946 and then rose to about $65,098 in the following hour. The total value of all cryptocurrencies fell about 4 percent in 24 hours to roughly $2.26 trillion.
It was not just bitcoin
XRP took the hardest hit among the big names. It fell to 89 cents in the early hours of Sunday, a level it last traded in early November 2024, right after Donald Trump won the election on promises of crypto-friendly regulation. The token has now dropped 36 percent this quarter and has been sliding since it peaked above $3.60 in July 2025, giving back roughly three quarters of that peak. The latest decline follows outflows from spot exchange-traded funds, with U.S.-listed XRP ETFs registering a net outflow of $19.13 million last week, the highest since March, according to SoSoValue data reported by CoinDesk. Capital is leaving through other avenues too: the combined market cap of the two biggest dollar-pegged stablecoins, USDT and USDC, has contracted to $244 billion, the lowest since September 2025, after peaking near $270 billion in early May. Glassnode analysts said stablecoin supply fell by $17 billion over the last month, the steepest drop since 2022. Bitcoin even slipped briefly outside the world's 15 most valuable assets by market capitalization on Sunday, according to Cointelegraph.
The Fed called it three days early
The most striking document of the week was not a price chart. It was the Federal Reserve's Financial Stability Report, published on Friday, November 13, three days before bitcoin's weekend low. The report is the Fed's twice-yearly look at vulnerabilities in the American financial system, and its survey found risks tied to artificial intelligence as the top-cited concern, with a broad correction in risk assets second at 52 percent. The survey was conducted in September and October, and the weekend delivered exactly the kind of correction the respondents had been worrying about. Futures markets now fully price in a quarter-point rate hike by the Fed in December, and Coinbase Institutional said on November 13 that traders were pricing in 64 basis points of hikes over the following year, up from 37 basis points at the start of the month. The spot bitcoin ETFs are not helping either, with seven straight trading days of withdrawals through November 13, about $1.91 billion in total.
The sellers are the same people who bought the top
On-chain analyst James Check wrote early Saturday that bitcoin is now in its fourth capitulation event since the all-time high, and he said most of those selling now are the people who were too indecisive to buy last summer in the mid-to-high $60,000s and then bought in September in the $80,000s. "They are now selling at the very price they wish they had taken advantage of three months ago," he wrote. Check said bitcoin is now in a "deep value" zone, last seen in February and late June of this year, and before that in late 2022. That does not mean the bottom is in, but history shows that people who start buying in these zones have eventually come out ahead, he said. The bounce on Sunday fits that picture: buyers stepped in hard at the lows, and the price recovered more than 6 percent before most of America woke up.
What happens next depends on whether the bounce holds. The weekly close on Sunday night will show how much bitcoin lost this week, and the reopening of CME bitcoin futures on Sunday evening will test whether the recovery survives the return of institutional trading. Spot bitcoin ETF flows when American markets reopen on Monday will show whether the seven-day outflow streak is breaking or getting worse, and the Fed's meeting minutes on Wednesday will be read closely for any hint about December. Anthropic prices its giant IPO the same day and starts trading on Nasdaq on November 19, which could either drain more cash from crypto or mark the end of the scramble for IPO money. Either way, Saturday night showed how fast a market can fall when leveraged longs pile up on one side, and Sunday morning showed how fast it can snap back when buyers decide the price has gone low enough.
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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
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