Coinbase Absorbed $1.08 Billion of Net Bitcoin (BTC) Selling, Data Shows

Coinbase's $1.08 Billion Selling Streak

Bitcoin (BTC) price steadied near $65,400 on Sunday after a slide that carried the asset from $81,188 on Nov. 4 to $61,956 on Nov. 14, a drawdown of roughly 24%, and the spot order-flow record now moves the blame from Binance to Coinbase. The drop unfolded while suspicion online fixed on Binance, where traders claimed in replies to founder Changpeng Zhao's own posts that the exchange was unloading client coins to cover a $6.4 billion hack suffered on Oct. 29, a theory that spread fast through the Bitcoin selloff debate. The cumulative volume delta record, which measures the difference between the volume of market buy orders and market sell orders, tells a different story on the spot side. A negative print there means sellers were the more aggressive participants, and Coinbase's spot CVD came in at -$1.08 billion across Oct. 31 to Nov. 15, a sustained selling footprint on the largest U.S. venue. Over the same window, OKX, Bybit and Binance all stayed in positive territory, at $240.3 million, $65.17 million and $51.88 million respectively, so market buyers outnumbered sellers on the exchange accused of dumping. The heaviest Coinbase selling landed between Nov. 10 and Nov. 14, exactly the stretch in which Bitcoin (BTC) broke below $70,000, placing the steepest part of the decline on the U.S. institutional channel rather than on offshore retail. Because Binance is the largest crypto exchange by trading volume and hosts a large share of futures liquidations, its name attaches to nearly every violent move in the asset, whatever its spot book actually shows. The distinction matters because the two venues serve different customers: Coinbase serves U.S. institutional flow through its Prime arm, while Binance's edge sits in derivatives, so a negative Coinbase delta against three positive offshore spot books reads as one cohort exiting rather than an exchange-wide exodus.

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Cumulative volume delta record.

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Our own Bitcoin technical analysis composite places the strongest support at $62,999, scored 87 out of 100, with a second floor at $61,664 graded 72/100, sitting just above the $61,576 level tied to Jiang Zhuoer's exit plan. Spot last printed $65,430, down 2.58% over 24 hours, leaving the market between those floors and the first resistance cluster above. Positioning leans the other way: funding runs at -0.0008% while the long/short account ratio stands at 3.23, meaning leveraged longs were still crowded into the flush. The downtrend label on our broader readings will not flip on its own; the Bitcoin halving cycle offers no supply explanation here, and it falls to accounts that HODL through drawdowns to absorb the flow before the trend turns.

Binance Cleared as Rotation Argument Builds

Binance's side of the story has a paper trail. Two weeks after the Oct. 29 attack, the exchange published a Proof of Reserves report showing that client balances were fully backed, an answer to the users on X who claimed the company was selling crypto to cover the loss. This week, Changpeng Zhao shared a comparison of Bitcoin (BTC) charts ahead of the SpaceX and Anthropic IPOs and called it “an interesting analysis,” and the replies filled with users pinning the drop on his exchange. The liquidation record adds texture to why the accusation sticks: derivatives data shows Nov. 13 saw 187,389 traders liquidated for $1.65 billion across exchanges in a single day, with longs absorbing 88% of the total, and a large share of those forced closures executes on Binance given its dominance in futures. The Coinbase flow, in turn, has a structural explanation. The venue is custodian for most U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, including BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, and many U.S. institutional investors trade through Coinbase Prime, whose custodial structure means the selling surfaces as aggregate venue flow rather than the trail of a single crypto whale or crypto wallet address. Anthropic is set to start trading on Nasdaq on Nov. 19, and Bitcoin (BTC) lost around 18% in the 50 days before that listing, so the Coinbase outflow lands inside a longer repositioning window. Fundstrat managing partner Tom Lee reads the drawdown into Anthropic's Nasdaq debut as a temporary rotation of money into mega-IPOs. That interpretation stops holding if the Coinbase delta stays negative once the listing is live; the first confirmation the rotation has ended would be a return to positive net buying on the same venue where the selling ran.