An $815 million leverage wipeout over a single 24-hour window rattled crypto markets this weekend, as Bitcoin slid from roughly $82,000 toward $79,000 before recovering into the low $80s.
The scale of the flush, while alarming to newcomers, reflects just how much leverage has accumulated in a market that has grown dramatically since the FTX collapse, when a comparable crisis produced $1.2 billion in liquidations.
Reduced weekend liquidity amplifies price swings, with fewer participants defending key levels and lower volume meaning that even modest buying or selling pressure can trigger cascading margin calls.
The liquidation event set a stark backdrop for corporate treasury activity, where two of the sector’s biggest names moved in opposite directions.
Strive (NASDAQ: ASST) executed its largest single Bitcoin acquisition on record, purchasing 6,182 Bitcoin at $82,732 each and bringing its total holdings to 43,000 Bitcoin.
The purchase was funded through proceeds from Strive’s recently completed offering of its fixed-rate 15% product, known by the ticker SATS, which generated the capital needed for such a sizable move.
Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), by contrast, bought no Bitcoin this week, instead deploying $205 million to repurchase its STRC preferred shares in an effort to bring that instrument back to par before resuming Bitcoin accumulation.
Strategy continues to hold 848,517 Bitcoin alongside $5.1 billion in USD assets, though its pivot to preferred buybacks marks a tactical shift away from its headline-grabbing weekly Bitcoin purchases.
Meanwhile, BitMine (NASDAQ: BMNR) disclosed a purchase of 10,452 ETH, pushing its total Ethereum holdings to approximately 6 million tokens, representing 4.95% of the entire circulating supply against a stated target of 5%.
With roughly 58,000 ETH still to go and the firm buying more than 10,000 tokens per week, the question of what BitMine does once it hits that threshold is becoming one of the more closely watched stories in digital asset markets.
On the institutional access front, Franklin Templeton filed updated prospectuses on October 22nd for two Bitcoin dividend reinvestment plan ETFs, with proposed tickers FBEQ and FIBT set to list on the NASDAQ.
The funds would hold 95% equities and 5% Bitcoin, with all dividend income from the equity portion reinvested exclusively into Bitcoin over time, gradually growing the crypto allocation without requiring active investor decisions.
The structure echoes a broader trend toward blended products that give mainstream investors Bitcoin exposure without demanding they engage directly with crypto infrastructure.
In legal news, J. Benjamin Greenberg, a former Circle employee and significant Circle shareholder, filed a federal lawsuit on October 22nd targeting World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by Donald Trump.
The suit challenges two specific transactions: a UAE-linked $500 million purchase of a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial tied directly to Trump’s shares, and MGX’s $2 billion Binance investment that was settled using the USD1 stablecoin.
Greenberg’s filing is notable for being the first known lawsuit to invoke the emoluments clause, which bars the president from receiving payments or benefits from foreign governments.
Circle itself has publicly distanced itself from the litigation, and the White House has dismissed the claims as frivolous while denying any conflicts of interest.
Separately, Ethereum’s “Glamsterdam” network upgrade, designed to reduce congestion on the blockchain, was delayed beyond its originally scheduled date, with developers now targeting Q3 and providing no firm new timeline.
On the security front, a wallet vulnerability in the Electrum platform was publicly disclosed on October 24th, with malicious servers found to be suppressing legitimate user transactions and substituting forged replacements that redirected funds to attackers, with two confirmed cases involving attacker addresses that matched the last four characters of the intended recipient’s address.
