Bitcoin Whipsaws From $107,000 To $103,000: What Went Wrong?

Bitcoin surrendered a weekend burst above $107,000 and was last changing hands near $103,200 in European trade, a $4,000 round-trip that unfolded in less than twelve hours. The leading cryptocurrency printed an intraday high of $107,111 during thin Asian hours before liquidity evaporated and spot markets on Binance and Coinbase slid to $102,000.

Bitcoin’s Violent Swing Explained

The volatility landed on the heels of Moody’s decision late Friday to cut the sovereign credit rating of the United States to Aa1, stripping the world’s largest economy of the last triple-A crown it still retained after downgrades by S&P (2011) and Fitch (2023). Moody’s cited an “uninterrupted rise in debt and interest costs” as the main driver. US 30-year Treasury yields poked above 5% for the first time since April, deepening the risk-off tone across equities and high-beta assets.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the ratings move in a televised interview on Sunday: “Moody’s is a lagging indicator. We didn’t get here in the past 100 days. We inherited a 6.7 percent deficit-to-GDP, the highest ever outside a recession or war. We are determined to bring spending down and grow the economy.”

Macro anxiety, rather than any crypto-specific headline, explains most of the pull-back, yet derivatives positioning amplified the swing. Coinglass data shows more than $665 million worth of leveraged positions were liquidated on the entire crypto market as perpetual funding flipped sharply positive into the spike and then reversed.

Dealers long gamma “seized the opportunity to lock in profits,” Singapore-based QCP Capital wrote in its Monday note, adding that the weekend pop owed much to “Metaplanet’s $104 million BTC purchase, alongside Strategy Inc.’s usual accumulation.” Still, QCP argued that Bitcoin’s ability to rally while equities softened “reinforces BTC’s positioning as a legitimate store of value.”

Flows into the ten US spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded funds underline that narrative. As of 29 April — the latest consolidated figure — the ETFs had drawn a cumulative $38.99 billion of net subscriptions and hold roughly 1.14 million BTC after another $591 million day of inflows, according to Farside Investors data.

Technical traders remain divided on what comes next. Adam Khoo, founder of Piranha Profits, reminded his 450,000 followers on X that previous US downgrades triggered 10% corrections in the S&P 500 but were fully erased within a year. “If the SPX drops another 10 percent this round, it would be another great opportunity for me to load up on high-quality businesses,” he wrote, musing whether markets will “panic a third time or be smarter now.”

For Bitcoin, the picture is less binary. On-chain data show exchange balances at multi-year lows, and options desks report persistent call-side skew — evidence, QCP says, of “structurally bullish” positioning despite the whipsaw. Yet traders eye the $101,000–$100,000 band as first-line support; a decisive break could expose the 50-day exponential moving average near $98,400, while reclaiming $107,000 would reopen January’s record high at $109,114.

Until then, the asset appears content to digest the Moody’s shock — and to let macro traders, not crypto die-hards, set the tempo of the next move.

At press time, BTC traded at $102,605.