Crypto Bloodbath: Multicoin Co-Founder Spots Massive ’Forced Seller’ Triggering Market Carnage
Digital assets are getting hammered—and one crypto heavyweight thinks he knows exactly why.
The Forced Liquidation Theory
Multicoin Capital's co-founder Kyle Samani dropped a bombshell observation about the recent market meltdown. He's pointing fingers at what he calls a 'systematic forced seller'—some whale or institution getting absolutely wrecked by margin calls.
When leveraged positions blow up, the domino effect hits everyone. Exhausted buyers can't keep up with the selling pressure, creating the perfect storm for continued downward momentum.
Market Mechanics Exposed
This isn't your typical profit-taking. Forced liquidations create artificial selling pressure that distorts true market sentiment. The crypto space has seen this movie before—remember 2022?
Smart money watches these moments carefully. They know panic creates opportunities, even if traditional finance types are probably sipping champagne and saying 'I told you so.'
The silver lining? Forced sellers eventually run out of things to sell. And that's when the real buyers step in.
Systematic Sell Pressure Points To Forced Crypto Seller
Other market participants are publicly describing a similar pattern. LondonCryptoClub wrote that it “increasingly feels like someone out there being forced to liquidate a portfolio,” highlighting the “constant mechanical nature of the selling (in US hours).” Drawing on their foreign-exchange background, they compared this to periods in FX where unexplained flows later turned out to be related to large corporate or M&A-driven mandates, summarizing the current environment as a “flow driven market” and concluding: “A dead body will probably float to the surface soon.”
ETF analyst James Seyffart responded to Jain’s post by asking whether anyone had “any theories or guesses on who it could be if this were true,” underscoring that there is, so far, no credible public attribution.
Rumors about structural damage surfaced almost immediately after the October event. On October 12, The Rollup Co founder Andy Klages wrote that the “rumor mill [is] currently saying two large trading firms were liquidated to zero,” describing a setup where they allegedly “owned a book of top 100 mcap tokens which were collateralized against each other in size ($1B+) & became forced market sellers of their entire book.”
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No firm fitting that description has publicly confirmed such a loss, but the structure Klages outlines matches what many professionals see as a key fragility: cross-collateralized altcoin books used as funding and margin.
Fundstrat’s and Bitmine’s Tom Lee independently argued on November 15 that the price action “has all the signs of a market Maker (or two) with a major ‘hole’ in their balance sheet,” describing “sharks circling to trigger a liquidation / dumping of prices BTC.” He characterized the resulting pain as short-term and explicitly stated that it “does not” change his view on “the ETH supercycle of Wall Street building on blockchain.”
To me, the weakness in crypto has the all the signs
– of a market maker (or two) with a major “hole” in their balance sheet
Sharks circling to trigger a liquidation / dumping of prices $BTC
Is this pain short-term? Yes
Does this change the $ETH supercycle of Wall Street… pic.twitter.com/0jfkXYnfv9
— Thomas (Tom) Lee (not drummer) FSInsight.com (@fundstrat) November 15, 2025
For now, there is no “dead body” on the surface: no major market maker or trading shop has publicly disclosed insolvency linked to October 10, and the identity of any alleged forced seller remains unknown.
But the consistency of the reports — systematic US-hours sell programs, rumors of cross-collateralized books blown out, and references to hidden balance-sheet holes — suggests that, weeks after the 10/10 shock, crypto markets may still be trading under the weight of positions that are being unwound because they have to be, not because anyone wants them to be.
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.1 trillion.
