Past Week In Crypto: $1.42B ETF Inflows, A $98K Bull Trap, And A Fast Reset To $92K
In Brief
Bitcoin staged a late-week breakout toward $98K but quickly reversed to $92.6K, highlighting a classic bull trap fueled by leverage, regulatory uncertainty, and risk-off sentiment.
Another week where Bitcoin tried to stop being boring… and then immediately reminded everyone why chasing strength in this tape is basically volunteering as liquidity.
On the chart it’s pretty clean: we spent the earlier part of the week finally pushing out of that consolidation limbo, got the vertical squeeze, and printed a high just shy of $98K. That’s the “old highs” zone the market keeps treating as a sell wall. Once we tagged it, follow-through didn’t show up. Price didn’t instantly collapse either — it did that annoying thing where it hangs around the top, chops sideways in a tight band around the mid-$95Ks, and gives late longs just enough time to convince themselves the breakout is “holding.”
Then the rug. Right around press time: a ruthless leg down, straight through the local range, back to ~$92.6K on a big red candle. That was no a gentle pullback. It reads like the market found maximum pain: trap anyone buying above resistance, stall them out, then sweep the stops and force the de-risking all at once.
So what were the undercurrents driving the week’s motion?
First, the ETF flow story stayed supportive on paper — spot Bitcoin ETFs pulling in about $1.42B for the strongest week since early October. In a healthier market, that kind of flow tends to act like a floor: dips get bought faster, and resistance eventually caves. Here, it looked more like “steady bid underneath” while everyone else used strength to sell into. The takeaway isn’t that inflows don’t matter; it’s that they’re not a magic wand when the marginal trade is still leverage and short-term profit-taking. Flows can keep the market from falling apart… and still fail to push it through a known ceiling.
Second, US policy headlines kept injecting that particular kind of uncertainty that traders hate because it’s binary, slow, and political. The CLARITY Act drama — with reports of the White House threatening to pull support after the Coinbase standoff, plus the broader fight over what’s allowed around DeFi, tokenized equities, and stablecoin rewards/yield — doesn’t hit price as a single “bad news candle.” It hits as a volatility tax. It makes people quicker to fade rallies, quicker to take profit at resistance, and less willing to hold risk through the weekend. You could feel that in how $98K behaved: nobody wanted to be the hero buyer into a policy headline tape.
Third, the security angle was loud again: the $282M social engineering heist (reportedly via an attacker impersonating Trezor support and tricking the victim into revealing seed phrase) is the kind of headline that doesn’t change Bitcoin’s fundamentals, but it absolutely changes behavior at the margins. It reminds everyone that “self-custody” is only as strong as the user’s operational security, and that big money can still disappear without a smart-contract exploit, just via human compromise. In the short run, those stories tend to push two opposing reactions at once: some people retreat to “safer” exposure (ETFs, regulated rails), while others de-risk altogether because it’s a reminder that this ecosystem still bleeds in ugly ways. Either way, it doesn’t help risk appetite for chasing breakouts.
Put it together and the week makes sense: spot demand showed up (ETFs), price finally had enough fuel to run stops and test the big $98K area, but the macro/regulatory tone and the market’s habit of selling strength turned that run into a bull trap. Once momentum stalled, it didn’t take much to knock the structure over — and when it went, it went quickly.
What matters now is whether this dump is just “reset the leverage, keep the higher low intact,” or the start of another leg back into the lower end of the range. Near-term, the market needs to reclaim the mid-$93Ks and then the mid-$94Ks quickly to defuse the breakdown. If it can’t, you’re back watching the old supports: roughly $92K, then the low-$90Ks, and ultimately that ~$89.5K area that’s been acting as the “cheap enough to defend” line in this whole chop regime. Reclaim $95.5K and the trap starts to look like a shakeout; stay below it and it’s just another reminder that $98K is still where rallies go to die.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
