One year after a tariff threat was linked to a record crypto liquidation event, Bitcoin remained more than 30% below its October 2025 peak. Anniversary-week selling again exposed the market’s vulnerability to leverage, but its scale was much smaller—and the available evidence does not show that another record wipeout is imminent.
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The 2025 crash and the anniversary sell-off
In October 2025, President Donald Trump’s tariff threat was followed by more than $19 billion in forced crypto liquidations. Bitcoin had set a record near $126,200 four days earlier, on October 6.
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49 When leveraged positions move sharply against traders, exchanges can close them automatically, adding forced selling to an already falling market.
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The anniversary week brought another sharp decline. Bitcoin fell toward $80,000, and reports put 24-hour crypto liquidations above $1 billion, including about $930 million in bets that prices would rise.
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7 Bitcoin later rebounded to about $83,025 on October 10, but remained on course for a weekly loss.
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The comparison needs care: prices and percentage moves vary with the time window. One report measured a 4.2% Bitcoin drop over 24 hours, while another described a roughly 3% decline over the week.
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47 Those figures describe different periods, not contradictory versions of the same move.
What the market signals say about recovery
Bitcoin has not reclaimed its peak. Reports put its price about 32% below the October 2025 record shortly before the anniversary sell-off.
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46 A separate account described three failed attempts to break above Bitcoin’s yearly opening price, suggesting rallies had struggled to hold momentum.
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ETF outflows add a demand signal, but are not liquidations. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded about $484.9 million in outflows on October 7, according to reporting on the anniversary-week sell-off.
45 That measures withdrawals from an investment vehicle; liquidation totals measure leveraged positions forced closed. They are different flows and should not be added together as if they were the same kind of loss.
Leverage indicators do not all tell the same story. One report put Deribit’s annualized Bitcoin funding rate near 7.1%, compared with 26.9% before the 2025 crash.
6 That is consistent with less elevated demand for leveraged long positions than before the crash. But reporting also said traders had added borrowed exposure heading into the anniversary week, leaving some positions vulnerable when prices fell.
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14 Lower funding is not a guarantee that leverage cannot build again.
What may keep pressure on crypto
Market reports cited rising oil prices and higher U.S. Treasury yields as factors weighing on sentiment during the anniversary-week retreat.
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8 Separately, reporting said the Federal Reserve raised its policy rate by a quarter point in September.
11 These are potential headwinds for speculative assets, but the sources do not establish that any one factor caused the sell-off.
Investors were also watching the October 14 U.S. inflation release as a possible catalyst, while one report identified $75,000 as a Bitcoin support level to watch.
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3 Those are points of market attention, not evidence that prices must move in a particular direction. The available reporting does not establish a leveraged-position cluster at $75,000.
What the evidence cannot establish
The provided reporting links the 2025 tariff threat to the liquidation record, but does not independently verify the specific account that thin Friday-evening trading, market makers pulling back and depleted order books drove Bitcoin from about $122,000 to $105,000. Those details should not be treated as established here.
Nor do the available figures prove a broad exodus of capital from crypto: the cited ETF outflows describe one investment channel, not every source of demand. Taken together, the evidence supports a market with an incomplete recovery and renewed vulnerability to leveraged selling. It does not provide enough information about leverage concentration or market liquidity to predict another $19 billion liquidation event.
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