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Morning Edition · Friday, November 13, 2026Published at 12:14 AM EST · New York
Bitcoin Falls Below $70,000 and More Than $1.3 Billion in Crypto Futures Positions Are Liquidated
Bitcoin fell to its lowest level since August as the dollar rose. Gold recovered part of its losses on Friday, but bitcoin did not.
Bitcoin fell below $70,000 early Friday, its lowest level since August 19, and ether fell below $2,000, CoinDesk reported. Citing data from Coinglass, CoinDesk said more than $1.3 billion in crypto futures positions were forcibly closed over 24 hours, $677 million of them in bitcoin. A Crypto Briefing report on TradingView counted $622 million in liquidations in a four-hour window.
The decline began in the rates market. On Thursday evening, Bitcoin Magazine reported that bitcoin traded near $71,200 after a session low near $71,000, while the 10-year Treasury yield held above 5%. The next leg down came as the dollar index reached a 19-month high.
Crypto Briefing attributed the move to deleveraging rather than any change in bitcoin's network or adoption. It said US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) had lost about $2 billion in outflows over three weeks. When institutional buyers withdraw at the same time as the cost of leverage rises, forced selling in the futures market makes the decline steeper.
The comparison with gold matters for investors who hold bitcoin as protection against monetary debasement. Both assets fell as real yields rose. Gold then rose about 0.9% early Friday from its 13-month low, while bitcoin kept falling. On the evidence of this week, bitcoin trades as a leveraged position that depends on liquidity, not as a reserve asset.
Part of a tracked trend
Bitcoin Trades as a Risk Asset, Not Digital Gold
At each geopolitical or inflationary stress point, bitcoin keeps trading with liquidity-sensitive risk assets rather than with monetary metals, so the digital-gold framing continues to fail exactly when investors most want it to hold.
What this means
The channel is the cost of money. Rising Treasury yields and a stronger dollar raise the cost of leverage and make holding an asset with no yield more expensive. Futures markets with heavy borrowing then amplify the move through forced selling. The exposed parties are leveraged long traders, crypto lenders, miners with thin margins, and companies that hold bitcoin on their balance sheets financed with debt. The decline is consistent with the Fed repricing and largely follows it. What deserves attention is the ETF outflows, which show that institutional demand is stepping back rather than buying the dip. The consensus treats bitcoin as digital gold. This week contradicts that view, because gold found buyers at its low and bitcoin did not. A precedent is 2022, when bitcoin fell steeply through the Fed's hiking cycle and lagged gold until rate expectations peaked. The desk's read is that bitcoin will likely stay under pressure into the December FOMC meeting and will track rate expectations rather than geopolitical risk, as long as the dollar stays firm. This read is wrong if ETF flows turn positive while yields are still rising, which would show demand that does not depend on liquidity.
What to watch
- Daily flows into US spot bitcoin ETFs. A return to inflows while rates rise would weaken the view that bitcoin is purely a liquidity trade.
- Funding rates and open interest in bitcoin futures. A rebuild of leverage soon after this flush would make another round of liquidations more likely.
- The gap between gold's and bitcoin's performance during the next risk event. A repeat of this week's split would confirm that the two assets serve different buyers.
Observations to monitor, not financial advice.
Synthesized from: CoinDesk · Bitcoin Magazine
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