Why Bitcoin’s $60k capitulation actually came in two waves

Bitcoin’s February drop to about $60,000 was the kind of single-day panic people will remember as a bottom.

But the more accurate reading of this washout is harder and more useful: this cycle quit in stages, and the sellers rotated.

A Feb. 10 report from Checkonchain framed the move as a capitulation event that arrived fast, on heavy volume, with losses large enough to reset psychology.

It also argues that the market had already capitulated once before, in November 2025, and that the identity of the sellers was different in each act.

So if we really want to understand where the weak points were, we have to look past the most dramatic candle and start looking at who actually sold, and why they had to.

Capitulation, in plain terms, means surrender.

It’s panic selling that accelerates a decline, usually because investors decide they cannot tolerate another leg down. In crypto, that surrender leaves a very visible footprint on-chain as realized losses.

The data suggests that what we saw in February was a flush that forced loss-taking at record scale. It also came after a first purge months earlier.

The numbers are blunt: short-term holders saw about $1.14 billion of losses in a single day, while long-term holders took about a $225 million hit that same day.

When we net losses against profit-taking, the net realized loss rate was around $1.5 billion per day during the heaviest window. When focusing only on realized losses, we can treat November 2025 and February 2026 as separate capitulation events that each exceeded $2 billion per day in realized loss.

It’s useful to frame this as two separate events because it explains a common frustration in this cycle.

Price can look like it is stabilizing and then collapse anyway, because the group still holding the risk changes.

One cohort can survive a drawdown, but another cohort can’t survive the boredom, the second failure, or the moment they realize their dip buy was just the first of many dips.

Act I: November broke the class of 2025

The first capitulation came in November 2025, when Bitcoin fell to about $80,000.

We can reasonably call this capitulation because realized losses in that November event were about 95% dominated by the “class of 2025.”

The idea behind this cohort is as interesting as it is useful. A cohort here means coins grouped by when they were acquired. If you know when a coin last moved on-chain, you have a timestamped cost basis for that unit.

Aggregate that across the network, and you can talk about who’s underwater and who’s not. That same logic sits behind realized price, commonly described as the average on-chain cost basis of coins in circulation.

In November, the sellers were the people who had lived through a year where the market never gave them the clean resolution they expected.

The report’s phrasing is that they gave up after a year of macro-sideways trading. That’s a specific kind of capitulation you might call exhaustion.

It’s the moment when time pain becomes price pain, because investors decide they would rather be wrong and flat than right and stuck.

That’s also why a lot of the talk about market cycles misfires here.

In previous bear markets, you could tell a neat story about a single final flush that cleared out leverage and broke the last believers.

This time, a lot of that work was done earlier and slower, through the calendar grind that made people stop caring.

The report even floats the idea that the long sideways stretch in 2025 should count as part of the bear’s duration. It argues that period paid time pain up front and loaded the spring for an earlier puke.

You don’t necessarily have to agree with that to see the point: sellers were already primed.

Act II: February broke the dip buyers, and dragged the rest with them

February is the second act, and it had a much different emotional signature.

Bitcoin touched a low of around $60,000, with the seller map shifting to a roughly even split between the class of 2025 and the class of 2026. In other words, the newer buyers became sellers.

Data shows those 2026 buyers were people who bought the $80,000 to $98,000 bear-flag zone, thinking they were buying the bottom. That’s capitulation by broken confidence.

The remaining 2025 cohort most likely sold because they regretted not selling at $80,000 and decided to sell at $60,000 instead.

That’s an ugly but realistic behavior pattern.

People don’t sell just because they’re down. They sell because they held through a chance to de-risk, and because a second crash makes the earlier mistake not to sell feel permanent. This is where the “two capitulations” framework earns its keep.

In November, the sellers were mostly one class.

In February, the market had to clear two classes at once: the exhausted holders from last year and the fresh dip buyers who learned they were early.

That combination is why the realized-loss numbers get so large, and why the emotional vibe gets so dark.

The report calls the realized loss spike in February the largest realized loss event in history in absolute dollar terms. The net realized loss flow was about $1.5 billion per day during the flush, because profit-taking was muted while losses exploded.

That ratio matters more than raw price, because it shows this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill redistribution. It was people hitting the eject button en masse.

The other tell is that the flush didn’t happen quietly.

Volume across spot, ETFs, futures, and options surged.

Aggregate spot volume was around $15.4 billion per day, while ETF weekly trade volume reached an all-time high of about $45.6 billion.

Futures volume jumped to over $107 billion per day from about $62 billion per day. Options volume doubled since January to about $12 billion per day, with around half tied to IBIT options. That put it above Deribit, at about $4 billion per day.