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.