I noticed an interesting detail in the story of Bitcoin dropping below $60 000 in early February. Everyone was talking about macroeconomics and exits from spot ETFs, but there was actually another hidden force that significantly accelerated the crash. It’s about market makers in the options market. To briefly explain, a maker is a market participant who constantly places buy and sell orders, creating liquidity and earning on the spread between bid and ask. They usually operate unnoticed, but sometimes their actions can greatly influence price movements. Between February 4 and 7, exactly this happened. The options market makers found themselves in a "short gamma" position in the range of $60 000 to $75 000. In simpler terms, they held short options positions without sufficient hedging, making them vulnerable to sharp price movements. When Bitcoin fell below $75 000, these makers started selling BTC en masse on the spot and futures markets to rebalance their positions and remain neutral to the price direction. This, in turn, created even more selling pressure. According to analysts, in the range of $75 000 to $60 000, there was approximately $1.5 billion of negative options gamma. This figure played a key role in why the drop was so sharp. A self-reinforcing cycle emerged: the price falls, market makers sell even more to hedge, and the price falls even further. Negative gamma means that makers are forced to hedge in the same direction as the price movement. When BTC declined, they became increasingly short gamma, which required even more sales to maintain balance. Interestingly, the market sharply recovered immediately after absorbing the last large gamma cluster around $60 000. Currently, Bitcoin is trading around $73 980, and it’s important to remember that market maker hedging isn’t always bearish. At the end of 2023, they were in a similar position above $36 000, but when the price broke through that level, they started buying BTC to rebalance, which helped push the price above $40 000. Separately, it’s worth noting XRP’s movement. The coin is rising amid high volume and accumulation by whales, with the current price around $1.36, but it remains in a broader downtrend and has yet to confirm a sustainable reversal. The integration of XRP into a payment app for tens of millions of users is an important step toward real-world application, but this is not yet fully reflected on the chart.

CryptoPotato's analysis suggests XRP (XRP) is approaching key resistance levels of $1.4 and $1.6 after two failed attempts to break through $1.4. The article highlights support at $1.3, indicating a potential battleground for the price in the coming week. Breakout above $1.4 could signal further gains for XRP.

I just read ZachXBT’s investigation about Axiom Exchange, and it’s quite a serious story involving insider trading. Apparently, a senior platform employee allegedly used privileged access to track users’ private wallets and trade based on insider information about meme coins. What’s the gist: the investigator claims that Brooks Bauer from Axiom could both find the index by a wallet address and obtain all information related to it through internal management panels. He allegedly collected data on the wallets of well-known crypto influencers in Google Sheets, tracking their meme coin holdings before the tokens were publicly promoted. The strategy was simple: identify early positions of known traders, and then take a position himself before the expected price increase. In the audio recordings published by ZachXBT, the alleged Bauer says he can track any Axiom user by referral code, wallet address, or UID and obtain any related information. He allegedly started with 10–20 wallets, then gradually increased activity so it wouldn’t look suspicious. Axiom responded quickly: it said it was shocked by what happened, disabled access to support tools, and promises to conduct an investigation. But ZachXBT honestly admits that without access to the platform’s internal logs, it’s hard to prove insider trading with 100% certainty based only on blockchain data. What’s interesting: on Polymarket, the bets on who is involved in the investigation shifted sharply toward Axiom. At the beginning of the week, the favorite was the Solana-based platform Meteora with a 43% probability, but by Thursday, Axiom had moved into first place with 35%. Although the odds in prediction markets reflect traders’ opinions rather than real evidence. This story shows how seriously data security in the crypto industry needs to be taken. If a platform can so easily disclose information about users’ wallets, that’s a huge risk. By the way, amid this scandal, XRP is moving in an interesting direction. According to the latest data, the price is holding at $1.36, down 0.36% over the day, with a trading volume of $43.97 million. The integration of XRP into the Rakuten payment app for 44 million users, with the ability to spend and earn through bonus points, looks like a real step toward mass adoption. But for now, XRP remains in a broader downward trend and has not confirmed a sustained reversal upward, despite whale accumulation and high volumes.