Late Sunday evening in Europe (August 24), Bitcoin abruptly slid from roughly $114,790 to $110,680 in about ten minutes — a drop of ~3.6% — before stabilizing. On-chain watchers and derivatives dashboards point to a single large seller catalyzing the move and a cascade of long liquidations finishing the job.
Why Did Bitcoin Crash?
The first thread of the story emerged on X from “Sani,” creator of TimechainIndex, who flagged a whale-scale cluster suddenly unloading inventory through Hyperunite/Hyperliquid–linked pathways. In his words: “This entity liquidated their entire 24k balance, sending all of it to Hyperunite. They transferred 12k just today and are still actively selling, which is likely contributing to the ongoing price drop.”
He followed with the broader scope of the holdings and their provenance: This entity still holds a total of 152,874 BTC across all associated addresses, including 5,266 BTC in the address shown below. The funds originally came from HTX about six years ago and had remained inactive until recent transactions involving one of their addresses containing approximately 24,000 BTC.”
Community replies captured the swirl of hypotheses around ownership and intent. One user asked who these coins belong to. Sani ventured a guess, tying the origin back to historic Asian exchange flows: “Best guess Justin Sun since they came from HTX, probably the coins sold by China 6 years ago”
Some suggested an exchange wallet given the sheer size. However, Sani cautioned that funds were being routed from the cluster to Hyperunite/Hyperliquid and then on to Binance — not directly from a Binance-owned wallet — arguing this pattern made an in-house exchange wallet less likely. “The funds are moving from these addresses to Hyperunite to Binance so most probably not Binance, if they were theirs they will move directly to Binance,” Sani argued.
Another datapoint adding heat to the narrative: flows into Ether. An account known as MLM (@mlmabc) tracked what it framed as an aggressive rotation: “This guy is really rotating everything into ETH huh? So far he has sold 18.142K BTC worth $2.04B at current prices. He’s now selling the last 5.968K BTC ($670M), of which 4.968K BTC ($678M) is still outside Hyperliquid.”
He added: “So far, the 2 entities have bought 416.598K ETH combined (currently valued at $1.98B) and longed 135.263K ETH ($642M) on perps, for a total notional ETH exposure of 551.861K ETH worth $2.62B. Out of the 416.598K ETH ($1.98B), 275.5K ETH ($1.3B) has been staked.”
Those flows did not materialize out of nowhere. Last week, Sani had already flagged the first movement from one of the dormant addresses: “An address holding 23,969 BTC has just moved 3,000 BTC after remaining dormant for five years. These funds were originally withdrawn from HTX, totaling 170,703 BTC across multiple addresses, and I suspect them to be connected to the coins sold by China at the time. Until yesterday, none of these funds had moved since the initial withdrawal.”
Futures positioning then turned a swift selloff into a flush. Real-time liquidation trackers showed hundreds of millions of dollars in positions force-closed across the market into the downdraft, with BTC longs bearing the brunt. CoinGlass’ dashboards recorded $218.29 million in BTC long liquidations on Sunday. Notably, this was the largest liquidation event since August 1 ($231.77 million) and June 12 ($299.41 million).
Technical context added tinder. Sunday’s slide set up a fresh CME Bitcoin futures “weekend gap” that many short-term traders treat as a magnet. As trader Daan Crypto Trades cautioned on X: “If BTC were to open up like this tomorrow, we’ll have a pretty sizeable gap. You’ve probably seen the track record these gaps have been on where we’ve closed pretty much all of them on Monday or didn’t even open up with a gap in the first place. Good level to keep an eye on. But as always, don’t solely base your analysis on this single thing.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $112,511.
