Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, after a screenshot showing Bitcoin worth around $24,111 on Binance went viral on
Did Bitcoin Really Fall to $24,000?
The sharp wick appears to be isolated in BTC/USD1, a market denominated in USD1, a stablecoin launched by Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial. Within seconds, the pair fell back to the typical Bitcoin price of over $87,000, according to exchange data cited by traders who shared the screenshots.
CZ’s explanation was simple. In an illiquid order book, a single aggressive order can print extreme prices before arbitrage can fill the gap. “This actually shows that the exchange is not involved in the trading. The low liquidity of the new pair means that one large market order could send the price skyrocketing, but arbitrageurs quickly corrected this. Since the pair is not included in any index, no liquidation occurred.”
The Binance founder shared an analysis by Catherine Chan, Head of Business Development at Solv Protocol, who said that this action was not a Bitcoin collapse but a “liquidity event.” She linked it to a Binance-and-USD1 promotion offering a 20% fixed APY deposit deal, enticing users to exchange USDT for USD1 and briefly driving USD1 to a premium.
“Many users were exchanging USDT → USD1, pushing the premium for USD1 to 0.39%, which is a huge amount for a stablecoin. Smart money borrowed USD1 from @lista_dao against SolvBTC or SolvBTC-BTCB smart lending marketplace (~0.5% APY). They either deposited USD1 directly or sold it slowly on the spot to meet demand. Then someone asked ‘Why not just sell through BTC/USD1? I thought, ‘Is that good?’ They used market orders. The problem: BTC/USD1 is very illiquid, so most of the buy orders were wiped out and the price was very low for a while,” Catherine explained.
“The arbitrage bot immediately bought it back,” she wrote. “The fundamentals have not changed. There are no mass liquidations.”
The episode also captured a familiar aspect of cryptocurrency paranoia. One user, Bera (@doomsdart), framed this as a coordinated signal: “Cz and the Trump family are telling us what they’re going to do to our coins. Get ready.” In contrast, CZ’s response suggested the exact opposite. The speed of the arbitrage and the lack of cascading liquidations are evidence that the venue is not “printing” the full market price at all.
The implications for traders are less dramatic than implied in the screenshot, but still relevant. New quote-asset pairs may be structurally weak, and promotions that quickly concentrate flows into a single stablecoin may leave unusually thin order books in their wake. In such markets, a single market order can make headlines before it sets the trend.
At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $89,298.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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