On-Chain Proof: The Crash Was a Bitcoin Panic, Not an Ethereum Collapse

Bitcoin’s violent slide from around $107,000 on November 11 to lows near $81,000 on November 21 has rattled traders across the market.

However, new on-chain data shows this was first and foremost a Bitcoin panic, not an Ethereum meltdown.

A Tale of Two Sell-Offs

Analysis from XWIN Research Japan shows how the October–November correction split the two majors. Indexed from October 1, Bitcoin dropped into the low-70s by late November, while Ethereum slid into the high-60s.

Historically, a 30% pullback in BTC has often meant a 40–50% hit for ETH, but this time the gap stayed unusually narrow, signaling that the latter held up better than usual even as fear spread.

The reason sits on-chain. Since the Merge, a growing share of ETH is locked in staking, while EIP-1559 continues to remove coins from circulation during busy periods. That means there are fewer tokens available to dump when the market panics.

By contrast, Bitcoin saw a clear liquidation spike on November 21, matching reports of nearly $2 billion in wiped-out positions in a single day as the asset briefly slid toward $81,000 before bouncing back above $84,000 and later reclaiming levels near $88,000 over the weekend.

BTC is currently trading around $86,000, down about 10% on the week, 19% over two weeks, and 23% on the month. On its part, ETH is sitting near $2,800, which is about 12% lower on the week, 22% down over 14 days, and 29% lower on the month; painful, but not the outsized damage of past cycles.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s MVRV ratio, a key on-chain valuation gauge, has dropped from around 2.5 earlier in 2025 to roughly 1.5 in this selloff, a zone that has often marked deep mid-cycle resets rather than final tops.

ETH Leverage Is a Time Bomb, but Supply Is on Its Side

Despite the seemingly positive news for the world’s second-largest digital asset, other market technicians have said that the calmer ETH spot picture hides a dangerous build-up in derivatives.

According to CryptoOnchain, Ethereum’s estimated leverage ratio on Binance climbed to a record 0.562, even as the price fell from about $4,200 to $2,800.

In other words, traders kept piling into leveraged longs while the chart trended lower, leaving the market exposed to another wave of liquidations if the cryptocurrency takes one more leg down.

Elsewhere, analysts are calling the current climate a “Zebra Market,” a term coined by XWIN Research to describe an environment defined by sharp, black-and-white price swings rather than a sustained bull or bear trend.

In such conditions, on-chain data becomes a critical tool for separating signal from noise, and for now, they frame this episode as a BTC-led flush in a choppy mid-cycle, not the start of an Ethereum breakdown.