Staring at the BTC daily chart for a full thirty seconds, a question popped into my mind: Is this fall faster than the altcoins I bought last week? This morning, the news section was flooded with various private messages, all asking the same thing — "Where did this big dump come from?"

Every time I encounter such a baffling cliff-like fall, I always want to remind people: every drastic fluctuation in the market is definitely not without reason. Just like when your cat suddenly puffs up, there must be an invisible hand behind it causing trouble—this hand is called "capital flow" in the crypto world. No matter how dazzling the candlestick charts are, in the end, it's still the capital that speaks: where the money flows, that's where the market will tilt. This is the hard truth I've learned after years of struggling in this market.

The "culprit" of this round of big dump is actually hidden in US Treasuries. You can think of US government bonds as a super pump, and recently the US government was on the brink of shutting down, with the Treasury's TGA account balance being pitifully low—market liquidity was already tight, and then a debt auction tossed out a staggering $163 billion, which is equivalent to directly drawing blood from the risk asset pool to pump into the bond market, so naturally, the crypto market is now "anemic."

What’s worse is that the Federal Reserve poured a bucket of cold water on it. Once Goolsbee made that hawkish statement, several traders I know who were eagerly anticipating a rate cut in December were dumbfounded—originally hoping that policy easing would inject vitality into the market, unexpectedly this wave of expectations was directly undermined.