Bitcoin fell below $73,000 on November 12, touching $72,735 on Binance and marking its weakest level since August 20. The move came after a brutal week for crypto, with leveraged longs getting hit again as the market tried to absorb one shock after another.
The price action is why traders are searching for the Federal Reserve Bitcoin Price Impact now. Bitcoin traded at $72,969 on Thursday and was down 9.4% from the November 4 close, while the wider market also lost ground. CoinGecko put the total crypto market at $2.42 trillion, with Bitcoin making up 60.5% of that value, a sign that the largest token is still setting the tone even as Ether, Solana and XRP fell harder over seven days.
What made the decline so sharp was not one event but a sequence of them. On November 9, reports of a probe involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and stalled U.S.-Iran talks hit risk assets. More than $1.15 billion of crypto positions were liquidated that day, and about $1.04 billion of them were longs. On November 10, a hot inflation report raised the odds that the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates in December, and another $723 million was liquidated, including roughly $570 million in longs.
Then came November 11. MSCI said it will drop Strategy from its stock indexes, and after the bell Nvidia fell 9% as its board weighed removing Huang. Those moves mattered because they added another layer of pressure to a market already leaning on borrowed money. Investors had already pulled about $1.88 billion from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in the first eight trading days of November, and the selling fed back into a market where forced liquidations were doing much of the damage.
That is the part that makes this slide harder to dismiss. Big liquidations usually wash out weak hands, but they have not done it here. On OKX, longs paid shorts 0.0092% every eight hours, the funding rate ran at about 6% a year over the past week, and open interest on Bitcoin futures held at $3.85 billion, unchanged from before Monday's flush. Even after the rout, longs still outnumbered shorts 3.11 to 1 on OKX, compared with 2.43 on November 4. The market is still crowded on the same side.
That leaves Bitcoin in a fragile place. The latest drop came with more than $1 billion of liquidations on Monday alone, almost all of them longs, and Tuesday brought another round of forced selling. If traders keep buying every dip with borrowed money, the next break lower could trigger the same chain reaction all over again. For now, the sell-off looks less like a completed purge than a market still trying to clear out leverage one wave at a time.
