Two $10 Million Bitcoin shorts opened at $10k: are whales anticipating a severe correction?

The bitcoin price recovered to around $10,000 right before the weekly close on February 24, closing at $9,945 on BitMEX. Almost immediately after it, two whales placed large $10 million shorts, anticipating the market to pullback.

When the bitcoin price plummeted from $10,331 to $9,260 on February 19 within merely hours, analysts attributed the overnight pullback to a single whale dumping large amounts of bitcoin at $10,300, on major margin trading platforms.

As said consistently by Joe007, the largest whale on Bitfinex, the bitcoin market is heavily leveraged and based on debt, as investors often utilize leverage in the range of 3x to 125x. Following the near 10 percent drop of bitcoin on a single day, Joe007 noted that long and short squeezes in the cryptocurrency market tend to be intense, and traders should not be taken aback by it.

Whales are possibly expecting the bitcoin price to go down after rejecting the $10,000 level upon the weekly close.

After the bitcoin halving takes place in late April, the breakeven price of mining BTC spikes to more than $13,000.

Simply put, the bitcoin price has to be over $13,000 for miners to be profitable in mining bitcoin.

In the perspective of miners, an ideal scenario would be to sell a portion of their bitcoin holdings before the halving while the price is high and finance 12 months of operations after the halving.

Miners paying for costs in advance is not a new concept; Brian Kelly, the CEO at BKCM and contributor at CNBC's Fast Money, previously said that some miners sold enough bitcoin in mid-2019 to not have to sell BTC for a full year.

Coincidentally, a month after Kelly's statement, the bitcoin market crashed from around $13,000 to as low as $6,410.

Halving is one of the most important events concerning bitcoin and its price because it directly affects the supply of the dominant cryptocurrency.