Futures Markets as the Main Driver of Short-Term Price Action | Bitcoin 2026

Hi everyone. Op. Who is selling their Bitcoin? Was anyone else asking that question when the price crated down to 60,000? When this post went out, it was 148,000 views in almost a few hours cuz everyone is asking the same question when the price crashes like this, right? Who is selling the Bitcoin? Is it the ETFs? Is it some mysterious whale? Is it some government wallet that's dumping their coins all at the same time? Everybody wants to know, and this is why a post like this gets so much engagement. But everyone's asking the wrong question. The question isn't who is selling the Bitcoin. The question is why is the Bitcoin being sold? And that's what we're going to explore in this presentation. But firstly, we need to understand that this is an algorithmic market, and pretty much all of them are. 2025, equities and stocks in our 70 to 80% algorithmic. Forex is up nearly as high as 90%. Commodities are moving up slowly, US Treasuries and bonds as well. But take a look at this. Bitcoin, 95% algorithmic. And this algorithmic trading is happening in the futures and derivatives markets because this is where speculation exists. This is where leverage is used, and it's my argument that it is these marketplaces that the algorithms in the futures and derivatives markets that are the main drivers of short-term price action. And I want to prove it to you. We're going to start off looking at October 2025. Have a look at this candle here. Comes all the way down there. That's a gigantic move in one single candle. There's nothing organic about that kind of price movement. And in order to see it a little bit better, we got to put on our x-ray vision. What I've done there is I've turned on the 25x leverage and I've shown you what the open interest look like at that given moment. So, what we're looking at here is a lot of leverage traders with huge positions, hugely leveraged positions, and a cluster of stop losses that has built up over time. What you can see here is a move that wiped them out completely. You could put it another way, they were hunted. And they were hunted by machines, they were hunted by algorithms. You can see as soon as we got to bottom of the pool, the price then bounced up and consolidated. So, what drove the short-term price action here? Leverage. People speculating on price using huge amounts of leverage, and then the market makers and the algorithms, the institutions, are designed to take them out. October 2025. The thing about algorithms is they can't be reasoned with. We can't beat them. They don't sleep. They don't eat. And they are coming for you. If you're in the futures markets, if you're trading, if you're using any kind of leverage, you are a target. I'll prove it to you one more time. I'm going to prove it to you two more times, actually. November 2025. Let's have a look here. We had the all-time high 124. We had the market crash down all the way to 80,000. Now, the 25x leverage, it's already been taken out, right? Let's put on our glasses again. I'm going to add the 5x and the 10x leverage. These are the more conservative leverage traders, right? They're only using 5x or 10x. But, the problem is there's a lot of them all around the world. And what we've got here is a huge pocket of liquidity that's built up over time. And what we see here is clearly the short-term price action is designed to take out those stops. It's designed to sweep that liquidity. That's why the bottom of that wick ends at the bottom of the liquidity pool. That's where the selling stopped. Once the selling stopped, once the leverage was taken out, the market then rebounded and then started to consolidate again, right? So, the derivatives, the speculation, the futures market is what's driving this sort of price action. It's where the open interest peaks and then the liquidation start to cascade. When the liquidation start to cascade, price starts to collapse. It all happens very quickly. The spot selling can happen after once the move has occurred because now the panic has set in. People start moving their money off wallets, off exchanges, selling it. But, what happened here was driven by leverage. So, we're down to 84,000. I showed you the tweet at the beginning, the price dropped to 60,000. So, what happened there? But, again, just to remind you, the algorithms, they didn't sorry if feel sorry for anyone that lost money. They don't feel sorry for you if you get wiped out. They don't feel sorry for you if you get liquidated. They don't care if your stop-loss is hit. These are machines that are designed incredibly well to do their job incredibly efficiently. And these are what institutions are run. This is what they're running. So, one final time, let's look at the liquidity. We're going to go down to the the the last or bottom that we had at close to 60K. Again, look at the movement here, look at the movement here. And look at this movement here. But we've already taken out the 5x, the 10x, and the 25x. Surely the people using only 2x leverage, they're going to be safe, right? Well, no. That's actually the biggest liquidity pool that existed. You can see it right there. Where did the wick stop? Right at the bottom of the largest open interest peak. And as you can see, these candles are extremely aggressive. They are hunting and stopping everyone out, hunting and stopping everyone out. And then again, we move back into consolidated price action, a much more uh natural version of of price movement, okay? That's the 3x leverage. There's nothing lower than that. That's it. Everyone got wiped out. 25x, 10x, 5x, and now 3x. And the reason is is because for these market makers and Wintermute, if we want to use some names, Jump Trading, exchange market makers on Binance and Bybit, this is what you see as a retail trader. You see a price chart. This is what they see. A treasure map. It's an absolute goldmine for algorithms. What they see is the liquidity and volume profiles you saw before. And they're designed to hunt the clustered stops, like machines do. And these clustered stops are targets. They're being hunted. They go always to the greatest clusters, and they will find their way there. The algorithms always behave in the same way. The problem is is we rarely see what they see, because the algorithms can read the order order books all at once. They've got all that data, all that information coming in, and they're working off that completely instantaneously. So, retail is basically getting eaten alive. Now, again, if you're if you're if you've got Bitcoin in cold storage, it's a different thing, right? That's long-term fundamentals. You're a hodler. But, actually, the majority of the trading happens in the speculative futures markets. That's just the reality of it. And Bitcoin is one of the most highly traded assets as well. And this this asset has been traded 24/7 all around the world in every single marketplace. I don't know if you know, but some of these exchanges allow you to use up to 500X leverage. 150X leverage is normal on some of these platforms. With this kind of leverage and this kind of speculation, how can we not expect this kind of violent behavior? And we all know in the last 6 months, it's been incredibly violent. Uh if you've been watching Bitcoin. So, who do you think is going to win in this game? Do you think it's going to be someone with an algorithm, or do you think it's going to be someone without an algorithm? You see, when you have an algorithm, it's reading the order book in seconds. Next, it's going to be executing without emotion or hesitation at all. And it's also already positioned before the moves happen, because it's engineered to behave in this way. It's not reacting in the moment. It's designed to absorb the whole universe of potentiality. So, when you're trading in these markets without an algo, you're essentially going to be reacting to moves that have already happened. You're going to be, by definition, as a human being, emotional, slow, and, of course, predictable. And this is true well for every single market. It has always been true in derivatives markets. The point is that in Bitcoin it is simply impossible to ignore. The behavior of these algorithms in the markets when you're watching that is so obvious and you can see before when we put on our uh liquidity glasses how that happens. So, if you're not running an algorithm, you really are going to be a victim eventually of the ones that are. Now, this is a a visual of a year. The last time we were in price discovery when we had the last breakout was over here, right? And you can see that two things happened once we started consolidating price. We build liquidity pools on the top side and the bottom side. Longs, shorts. Everyone is using leverage. Everyone is using stop losses. This is the open interest. The algos are going to read the book. They're going to find the thin side and they're going to take it out. Bang, bang, bang. 25, 10, 5, 3. Well, since what you've seen so far, where does it look like the price is going to go? Probably somewhere here. And that's where the algorithms are going to profit from all the buying and selling that they've just done. They've made everyone here sell. These are all buyers, forced buyers on the short side. When the market starts to move up, these will all be liquidated shorts. What's interesting that you can see here is that we already have 25 X, 10 X, 5 X, and 3 X already built into the treasure map. It's already there. I don't want to predict where price is going. Just take a look at that yourself. I find this very interesting. So, what then, having understood all this, would be the right question to be asking? How do I get one? Because when you have an algorithm, you can play against the algorithms. You can trade with an algorithm. You can move like an algorithm. You can get your own machine to do the trading for you. Welcome to Predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline [music] moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct. Your prediction, your edge. Dual bits, predict where everything is a market. So, the real question is, do you have an algorithm that's going to profit either way? Because whether Bitcoin goes up or whether it goes down, you should be in a position to benefit, just like the algorithms, the market makers. They don't care if Bitcoin goes up. They don't care if it goes down. They're going to make money either way, cuz that's what they're designed to do. To be To be honest with you, the more volatility for them, the better. The deeper the crashes, the better. The bigger the boom and bust cycles, the more money they're going to make. Now, most people don't have the edge, and that is the edge. Having an algorithm that can make you profit either way is that edge. Now, to do this, you want to have something that has volatility capture, okay? You don't want something that's guessing where the price is going. So, you want to engineer profit from swings either side. You don't want to hide from them. You also want something that's fully automated, which means no manual intervention. You don't want to have to get up at 2:00 in the morning and make changes. You don't want to have to interrupt your holidays to trade. It needs to already be doing it and it can't hesitate ever. It cannot be afraid of a price crash. Now, algorithms not, but we all are. The algorithm is not. And you also want precision. You want structured entries. You want defined exits and you want clever positioning. When you have a tool like this, you can enter the futures battleground with something that is going to help you survive uh environment that is designed to take you out. So, if you're interested in learning more about how I to get an algorithm, walk straight down there to the Minotaur Trading Systems booth and we'll give you a full demo of how our trading algorithms and automation works. Thank you. Yep. >> [music] >> Every year this community comes together >> [music] >> to celebrate to debate to build what comes next. >> [music] >> And every year the stage gets bigger. >> [music] >> Sound money center stage. So, where do you [music] go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, [music] July 2027.