Persistent, programmatic selling across major crypto assets has sparked fresh speculation that the market is still digesting cascading liquidations from October 10 — and that at least one large player is being unwound in the background.
That delayed discovery of losses is central to the emerging “forced seller” narrative. Rather than a single cathartic event, the 10/10 wipeout is being treated by professionals as the starting point of a longer adjustment, where risk is reduced gradually as lenders, counterparties and risk desks work through opaque exposures.
Other market participants are publicly describing a similar pattern. LondonCryptoClub wrote that it “increasingly feels like someone out there being forced to liquidate a portfolio,” highlighting the “constant mechanical nature of the selling (in US hours).” Drawing on their foreign-exchange background, they compared this to periods in FX where unexplained flows later turned out to be related to large corporate or M&A-driven mandates, summarizing the current environment as a “flow driven market” and concluding: “A dead body will probably float to the surface soon.”
ETF analyst James Seyffart responded to Jain’s post by asking whether anyone had “any theories or guesses on who it could be if this were true,” underscoring that there is, so far, no credible public attribution.
No firm fitting that description has publicly confirmed such a loss, but the structure Klages outlines matches what many professionals see as a key fragility: cross-collateralized altcoin books used as funding and margin.
To me, the weakness in crypto has the all the signs
– of a market maker (or two) with a major “hole” in their balance sheet
Is this pain short-term? Yes
For now, there is no “dead body” on the surface: no major market maker or trading shop has publicly disclosed insolvency linked to October 10, and the identity of any alleged forced seller remains unknown.
But the consistency of the reports — systematic US-hours sell programs, rumors of cross-collateralized books blown out, and references to hidden balance-sheet holes — suggests that, weeks after the 10/10 shock, crypto markets may still be trading under the weight of positions that are being unwound because they have to be, not because anyone wants them to be.
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.1 trillion.
