The post Why Bitcoin’s $60k capitulation actually came in two waves appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Bitcoin’s February drop to about $60,000 was the kind of single-day panic people will remember as a bottom. But the more accurate reading of this washout is harder and more useful: this cycle quit in stages, and the sellers rotated. A Feb. 10 report from Checkonchain framed the move as a capitulation event that arrived fast, on heavy volume, with losses large enough to reset psychology. It also argues that the market had already capitulated once before, in November 2025, and that the identity of the sellers was different in each act. So if we really want to understand where the weak points were, we have to look past the most dramatic candle and start looking at who actually sold, and why they had to. Capitulation, in plain terms, means surrender. It’s panic selling that accelerates a decline, usually because investors decide they cannot tolerate another leg down. In crypto, that surrender leaves a very visible footprint on-chain as realized losses. The data suggests that what we saw in February was a flush that forced loss-taking at record scale. It also came after a first purge months earlier. The numbers are blunt: short-term holders saw about $1.14 billion of losses in a single day, while long-term holders took about a $225 million hit that same day. Graph showing Bitcoin’s realized losses by age cohort on Feb. 7, 2026 (Source: Checkonchain) When we net losses against profit-taking, the net realized loss rate was around $1.5 billion per day during the heaviest window. When focusing only on realized losses, we can treat November 2025 and February 2026 as separate capitulation events that each exceeded $2 billion per day in realized loss. It’s useful to frame this as two separate events because it explains a common frustration in this cycle. Price can look…

---

Filed under: News - @ February 15, 2026 5:18 pm