Jiang Zhuoer Exits All DeFi Holdings at His $61,576 Re-Test Level

The $61,576 Threshold

Jiang Zhuoer, the founder of a Bitcoin mining pool, sold his entire book of small-cap DeFi tokens on Sunday, closing the position as the coin's decline drew close to $61,576, the price he had set for re-examining his call that the market was still in the opening stage of a bull run. He sold into the morning rebound and described what remained of his exposure as a neutral position held behind hedges. The liquidation covered only his small-cap DeFi tokens, not his whole crypto portfolio. He announced the sale in a post published on Nov. 15, the second step of a two-step retreat that began a day earlier.

On Saturday he had disclosed a short hedge sized at 200% of his position, opened at $65,720 to offset the exposure he already carried. A hedge, in this usage, is a trade set against an existing position so that price risk on one side is cancelled by the other; a hedge at 200% is twice the size of the underlying book. When that trade was disclosed, his small-cap DeFi holdings had been left outside it, which left that part of the portfolio unhedged through Sunday's slide. Those tokens sit in the most fragile tier of the altcoin market, where drawdowns in a Bitcoin-led slide tend to run deeper than the losses on the core asset itself.

The $61,576 mark was his own analytical benchmark, chosen to test whether his judgment that the current market was the start of a bull phase had been wrong. Traders who publish such a threshold in advance convert their own analysis into a trigger, and his did exactly that: by Sunday morning he judged the fall had come almost to the level, and the book had to go.

Broken Supports and a $57,800 Warning

Two of the levels he had treated as support gave way first. The point of control at $63,853, the price band where the most trading volume accumulated over the period he analyzed, broke, and so did the 78.6% Fibonacci retracement at $64,100, a retracement gauge that measures how deep a correction runs inside a larger trend. Both are staples of standard Bitcoin technical analysis, and both were his own readings rather than consensus levels. He said the pace of the fall had been faster than he had anticipated.

In his Sunday post he laid out the condition under which the damage could widen: if the market is confirmed to have entered the late phase of a bear cycle and Bitcoin falls below $57,800, he expects the drawdown in small-cap DeFi tokens to exceed what the core asset itself suffers. The projection carries two conditions, a confirmed phase change and a break of that price, and neither had been met when he wrote.

He said he had cleared the holdings while losses still sat at a level he could absorb, and he acknowledged a significant error in his mid-term read of the market. He also said he would step back and suspend trading for the time being. The decision landed in a market our own monitoring shows under strain: spot was down 4.3% over the past 24 hours, recent trading saw a short squeeze that liquidated $121 million in an hour, and our earlier work found short-term supply underwater for 73% of holders, with a 13.7% weekly loss trailing a US equity rebound.

From Hedge to Full Exit

The exit reads as a framework executing on schedule rather than a panic sale: the hedge went in at $65,720 on Saturday, and the small caps were closed the next morning as $61,576 came into reach. That discipline cuts both ways. Publishing a re-test level forces the trade when the market arrives, and it also puts $57,800 on record as the next marker for anyone tracking the same map. A closely watched crypto whale stepping aside entirely, choosing to suspend trading rather than ride the drawdown in the HODL style of long-term holders, is itself a sentiment datapoint. His own posts leave open whether the pause outlasts this leg of the market.