Bitcoin snapped from a push above $90,000 back toward the high $80,000s on December 29, triggering loud accusations of a “multi-billion” market maker dump even as hard data shows a much smaller transfer footprint and a structurally fragile, overleveraged market doing what it usually does in thin conditions.
At the time of writing, BTC traded near $87,900, essentially flat over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. That leaves the coin sitting just above the lower end of its recent $86,800 to $90,000 weekly range, after Monday’s intraday round-trip cleaned out both late longs and eager shorts.
Whipsaw price action, internet jumps to a culprit
The latest leg started when Bitcoin briefly broke $92,000 on December 29 before fading back below $88,000 later in the day, as noted by multiple market dashboards and summarized by CryptoSlate. Order books on Binance, Bitstamp and Bybit all showed a near-identical pattern. Aggressive buying punched through offers into a thin holiday tape, then an equally aggressive sell program walked price back to where it started.
On X, trader Wimar posted Arkham and exchange-flow screenshots, naming both Binance and market maker Wintermute as the architects of what he framed as an on-chain rug pull.
Wimar accused Binance and Wintermute of “multi-billion dollar manipulation” visible on-chain.
The thread, which remains live at x.com/DefiWimar, went viral fast. Screenshots of the same V-shaped BTC candles circulated from accounts like @TedPillows and @thedefivillain, who highlighted at least 11 similar intraday spikes and retraces over December across major venues.
The receipts: tens of millions on-chain, not billions
The on-chain evidence behind the Wintermute accusation looks far smaller than the headline suggests. CryptoSlate’s read of the same Arkham traces shows roughly 87 BTC leaving Binance for a Wintermute-linked deposit address around the episode window, plus a handful of related moves adding up to less than $30 million in gross value, not billions of dollars in directional selling.
That number matters. A transfer of tens of millions can still reflect an active professional desk, but it does not match the narrative of a single actor unloading multiple billions in spot Bitcoin into the market. It looks more like inventory shuffling and collateral management across venues, which is routine for high-frequency market makers.
Derivatives data tells a similar story. CoinGlass’ Bitcoin open interest page at coinglass.com/BitcoinOpenInterest, as summarized by CryptoSlate, shows open interest shifting by less than 1% over the 1‑hour, 4‑hour and 24‑hour windows around the move. That is not what a forced unwind of multi-billion directional risk looks like.
Liquidations also came in well below the social-media rhetoric. A Coinglass snapshot relayed by KuCoin in a December 30 flash note reported roughly $299 million in total crypto liquidations over 24 hours, split into about $160 million of longs and $139 million of shorts across all major assets, not just BTC (KuCoin). Separate CoinGlass figures cited by Stocktwits put Bitcoin-specific liquidations near $82 million over the same period, with longs carrying most of the pain (Stocktwits).
Context helps. CoinGlass data compiled earlier this week shows 2025 produced around $150 billion in forced liquidations, with a single October event topping $19 billion in one day. Against that backdrop, a roughly $300 million washout is noisy for intraday traders but small in structural terms.
Order-book microstructure points to stop-hunting
The most compelling part of CryptoSlate’s work sits in the order-flow analysis rather than the wallet labels. Using Binance cumulative volume delta (CVD), the article shows a clean pattern. Aggressive buys lifted offers and pushed BTC through $90,000, then aggressive sells hit bids and dragged price back, leaving both spot and CVD near flat over the full 24‑hour window.
That is classic stop-hunting behavior. A player with enough size and speed leans into obvious liquidity pockets, triggers clustered stops and late momentum entries, then trades the reversal back toward the starting point. The gains do not come from a directional bet on Bitcoin’s fair value. They come from harvesting forced flows on both sides.
Crucially, the same inverted V-shaped pattern repeated across Binance, Bitstamp and Bybit throughout December, as highlighted in CryptoSlate’s chart pack. CoinGecko’s exchange dashboard at coingecko.com/en/exchanges currently shows Binance spot volume around $10.5 billion over 24 hours, with many other centralized exchanges failing to clear $1 billion. That combination of concentrated liquidity and holiday-thin books makes it easier for large traders to run this playbook repeatedly.
Why traders are right to be angry, even if the “multi-billion” claim is off
The gap between the rhetoric and the receipts does not mean traders are wrong about the structural issue. It means the issue is more subtle than a single villain pressing a red button.
On-chain flows point to professional desks like Wintermute actively repositioning around the move rather than dumping billions in spot. Order-flow data shows a market that reacts violently when someone leans into obvious stop zones on a day when many desks are flat for the holidays. Derivatives data shows a few hundred million dollars in liquidations, which is painful for overexposed traders but routine for a market that pushed $150 billion in liquidations through the system this year.
The result is the same for retail. Sharp intraday spikes invite FOMO entries and leveraged bets. Fast reversals kick out anyone who arrived late. The evidence on December 29 points to opportunistic stop-hunting in a structurally fragile market, not a provable multi-billion dump orchestrated by a single market maker.
