The post Binance trading data reveals why Bitcoin prices are sliding even as spot buyers flood the market with bids appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Bitcoin’s hard cap is easy to understand: there will only ever be 21 million coins. What’s hard to understand is that the marginal market is allowed to trade far more than 21 million coins worth of exposure, because most of that exposure is synthetic and cash-settled, and it can be created or reduced in seconds. That distinction has become Bitcoin’s core paradox in the past year or so. Scarcity is a property of the asset, while price is a property of the market microstructure that dominates the next aggressive order. When derivatives volume and leveraged positioning become the dominant arena, Bitcoin can trade like an asset with a tight supply and, at the same time, like an asset with effectively elastic exposure. 21 million coins, but a much larger marginal market Spot is the only venue where a trade necessarily moves actual BTC from one owner to another. Perpetual and dated futures don’t mint coins, but they do create a second market that can become larger, faster, and more reflexive than spot. Perps are designed to track spot through a funding mechanism and can be traded with leverage, which means a relatively small amount of collateral can control a much larger notional position. That combination tends to pull activity into derivatives when traders want speed, leverage, shorting ability, and capital efficiency. Price discovery is simply where the next meaningful market order lands. If most urgency lives in perps, then the path of least resistance is set there, even if long-term holders never touch leverage and even if the underlying supply is fixed. In that regime, moves are frequently driven by changes in positioning: liquidations, forced de-risking, hedging flows, and the rapid repricing of leverage. Those flows can overwhelm the much slower process of spot accumulation, because the marginal actor isn’t…

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Filed under: News - @ February 7, 2026 5:17 pm