Was the Recent Crypto Crash an Orchestrated Shake-off?

On February 21, 2025, Bybit, a major cryptocurrency exchange, suffered a hack losing approximately $1.5 billion in Ethereum, marking it as the biggest theft in crypto history.

If the plot wasn’t thick enough already, shortly after the Bybit hack, Bitcoin, and the wider cryptocurrency market experienced a significant flash crash, with Bitcoin prices dropping to around $86.000.

It gets juicer still — this event led to mass liquidations on Bybit, Binance, and OXK, amounting to — you guessed it — $1.5 billion dollars in value.

This took place days after the hack, and while the hack itself did have some impact on the market itself, it seemed as if the market was going to simply shrug it off, until late on February 24th, when another event occurred.

The Theory and Liquidations

The theory suggests Bybit, alongside Binance and OKX, sold massive amounts of crypto to purposefully crash the market and liquidate long positions, profiting off of these.

If you actually look at the recent Exchange Liquidations, Bybit is the exchange that has seen the highest number of liquidations.

To put things in perspective, Bybit has a daily trading volume of $6.1 billion, compared to Binance’s $44 billion — so Binance has…