On February 6, 2026, at 07:07 GMT (East 8 Time), Binance's Security Asset Fund (SAFU) transferred 3,600 BTC from the platform's main account, equivalent to approximately $233.57 million according to Whale Alert records, increasing its position against the backdrop of severe market fluctuations. During the same period, Coinglass data showed that the total liquidation scale across the network reached $2.597 billion in the past 24 hours, involving about 570,000 traders being passively liquidated, while Greeks.live disclosed that 33,000 BTC options were set to expire, with the maximum pain point around $80,000. The increase in the security fund's position starkly contrasts with the high-leverage retail traders being washed out: on one side, long-term funds are stepping in during the downturn, while on the other, high-leverage positions are being passively exited. This article will analyze the funding path of this $233 million buy order, the effects of the options expiration, and the impact on BTC prices and chip structure in the context of a chain liquidation.
The Interplay of Large Purchases and the Nature of the Security Fund
● Funding Transfer Details: According to Whale Alert, on February 6 at 07:07 GMT, a Binance-related address was monitored transferring 3,600 BTC to an internal address marked as SAFU, with an on-chain label indicating a transfer between platform accounts, amounting to approximately $233,573,371. Although the report did not provide specific details on the multi-level jumps and final storage solutions, it can be confirmed that this transfer from "main account → security fund" is not a routine self-operated adjustment but rather an action to solidify liquid funds as risk reserves.
● SAFU Role Definition: SAFU is defined as a user protection and risk reserve mechanism, with funding sources typically composed of platform fee income and existing reserves, allocated in predetermined proportions to high liquidity assets like BTC to address payouts and safety incident compensations during extreme events. The transfer of over $233 million worth of BTC reflects a proactive approach to enhance the buffer during periods of volatility, rather than a short-term trading intention, demonstrating a funding management framework that prioritizes risk resistance over short-term profit and loss.
● Scale and Price Impact: The 3,600 BTC in the current market environment is close to the visible large order level for daily trading in many mainstream spot trading pairs, but compared to the total daily trading volume of global spot and derivatives, it still constitutes a medium-sized structural buy order. This type of concentrated buying that appears after a sharp decline can provide lower liquidity support for prices in the local market, while also being seen as a directional signal for "buying the dip," positively influencing short-term sentiment and expectations rather than directly determining a single price curve.
● Differences in Risk Appetite between Self-Operated and Security Funds: Exchange self-operated positions typically engage in daily market making and trend speculation, leaning towards hedging and profit management through futures and leverage tools, with positions being more tactical; whereas the security fund is designed as a long-term, low-turnover reserve pool, akin to an "extreme event insurance vault." Therefore, even though both are increasing their BTC holdings, the security fund's accumulation implies lower leverage and longer holding periods, with significantly lower sensitivity to price and passive liquidation probabilities compared to self-operated trading positions.
One Side is Liquidation Bloodbath, the Other is Capital Bottom Fishing
● Meaning of Liquidation Data: Coinglass data shows that before and after the SAFU increase, the total liquidation amount across the network reached $2.597 billion, involving about 570,000 passive liquidations. This scale indicates that volatility has evolved from a local correction into a typical "de-leveraging event." Such a large amount of forced liquidation means that many high-leverage long and short positions were forced out in a short time, with chips flowing from forced liquidation to off-market buyers and liquidity providers, while SAFU's increase during this period stands in stark contrast to the passive selling funds.
● Leverage and Chain Liquidation: When prices deviate rapidly, an excessively high market-wide leverage ratio can trigger a chain liquidation mechanism: an initial batch of forced liquidation orders breaks through the market, prompting more accounts to hit maintenance margin requirements, resulting in a "gap-down" or surge. For retail traders, positions often lack stop-loss discipline and flexible margin management; once volatility exceeds expectations, liquidation is not an active decision but a system execution result, magnifying losses, while the price's shift towards extreme ranges is further pushed up.
● Structural Differences between SAFU and Retail Traders: Compared to high-leverage retail traders, SAFU is essentially a non-leveraged, low-turnover long-term fund pool, with stable funding costs that are not forced to sell due to margin pressure. Retail traders are often concentrated in short-cycle contracts, with limited capacity to withstand volatility, while the security fund primarily holds spot assets, not pursuing intraday volatility profits, thus having significantly higher tolerance. This vast gap in position structure, leverage levels, and risk control tools determines that in the same round of volatility, one side is forced out while the other can complete its layout at more favorable price ranges.
● Restructuring of Chip Distribution: When the liquidation wave "cleanses" high-leverage chips from the market, while the security fund and other long-term funds step in below, the holding structure of BTC will evolve towards higher concentration and lower average leverage. In the short term, this may suppress a rapid price rebound, as passive selling pressure dominates; however, in the medium to long term, a more robust holding structure often means that future selling pressure comes from long-term investors rather than passive liquidations, with a potential weakening trend in market sensitivity to macro and fundamental bearishness.
33,000 Options Expiration and the $80,000 Pain Point
● Expiration and Pain Points: Greeks.live data shows that there are approximately 33,000 BTC options set to expire in the current window, with the corresponding maximum pain point around $80,000. In this price range, the combined profit and loss of buyers and sellers of open contracts is least favorable, with sellers experiencing the smallest overall losses, thus regarded as a natural "tilt" zone for market makers and large funds in pricing and hedging. This figure may not necessarily become a target to be reached, but it will create a pull on sentiment and expectations for spot and perpetual prices.
● Market Implications of Maximum Pain: The so-called maximum pain point is the point at which the net profit and loss of options buyers and sellers is minimized across different strike prices. For market makers, the closer the price is to this point, the more controllable the overall hedging costs and performance risks become, which is why as expiration approaches, they often adjust futures and spot positions to "pull" the underlying price towards this central area. This behavior is not manipulation but rather a natural result of risk-neutral hedging, which can impose constraints and noise fluctuations on short-term trends.
● Hedging Behavior and Volatility Amplification: As large options approach expiration, market makers and large players need to dynamically rebalance based on Gamma and Vega exposures, hedging risks by buying or selling futures and spot. When the underlying price rapidly deviates from the maximum pain point, the required hedging scale will non-linearly amplify, leading to intense chasing and killing transactions in futures and spot markets in a short time, further amplifying the volatility originally driven by spot supply and demand, forming a multi-layer transmission chain of "options → futures → spot."
● Temporal Overlap and Capital Game: The expiration window of 33,000 options coincides highly with the network-wide $2.597 billion liquidation and SAFU's increase of 3,600 BTC, creating a typical multi-factor resonance interval: on one end is the passive positions brought by options hedging, on another end are the high-leverage chips being liquidated, and on the other end is the long-term buying pressure represented by SAFU absorbing the selling pressure. As a result, the short-term price path is shaped more by various passive trading logics rather than a single directional subjective bottom-fishing or dumping behavior.
Is the Exchange's Supplemental Safety Net Fireproof or a Bottom Support?
● Risk Preparation and User Confidence: From a risk management perspective, expanding the SAFU scale during severe volatility essentially reserves more repayment and emergency space for extreme situations. When users know that the platform insists on locking available resources as a security fund during high volatility rather than shrinking reserves to protect profits, overall confidence and assessments of the ability to withstand "black swan" events tend to be positive, helping to stabilize existing users and reduce panic withdrawals and stampede risks.
● Asset Correlation and Synchronization Downside Risk: Allocating more reserves to BTC also means that the security fund is more closely correlated with other income sources of the platform in terms of asset prices, which may synchronize under pressure during extreme downturns. However, compared to fiat currencies or high-risk tokens with more volatile returns, BTC remains one of the most liquid and relatively stable-performing crypto assets in the current market. The security fund's choice of BTC as the main base asset is a compromise between "short-term net value volatility" and "long-term redeemability," rather than a completely risk-free asset allocation.
● Implicit Bottom Support on the Emotional Level: From the market perception perspective, publicly disclosing that "the security fund bought thousands of BTC after the crash" can easily be interpreted as the platform having some form of "confidence endorsement" in the lower price range. Even if SAFU has no active bottom-support obligation, this information disclosure itself can provide psychological support for some investors, making them more willing to hold or even increase their positions during pullbacks, thus forming a weak bottom support effect on the emotional level, buffering against panic selling.
● Regulatory Perspective and Industry Self-Insurance Image: In the eyes of regulators, the establishment and continuous expansion of safety funds like SAFU by exchanges is a key part of the industry's self-constructed "self-insurance mechanism," which helps to weaken the stereotype of "purely high-leverage speculative platforms." The continued enhancement of the safety net during high volatility not only provides a positive case for future dialogue with regulatory agencies but may also become a bargaining chip in the industry's internal competition for "safety and compliance image," pushing more platforms to enhance transparency in reserves and risk control.
Bybit's Outward Expansion and the Intersection of AI Concepts
● Zero-Fee Expansion in US Stocks: Unlike Binance, which thickens its buffer on the security fund, Bybit chooses to extend into traditional finance at the business level by launching zero-fee trading for US stocks, aiming to attract a broader range of cross-market traders. For crypto exchanges, this means evolving from a single cryptocurrency trading platform to a one-stop brokerage covering various asset classes like crypto and equity, competing for user asset allocation entry rather than just trading fee income.
● AI and Hardware Sentiment Linkage: Bybit's simultaneous launch of storage chips and optical communication stocks strengthens the narrative linking the crypto market with the AI hardware sector. For investors accustomed to chasing AI concept assets on-chain, they can directly participate in traditional targets providing computing power, storage, and communication infrastructure for AI within the same ecosystem, creating a "closed loop" of sentiment and capital between on-chain tokens and offline hardware leaders, deepening their coupling in the macro technology cycle.
● Comparison of Different Competitive Routes: Binance emphasizes platform security and risk resistance by increasing BTC to enrich SAFU, while Bybit emphasizes asset lineage and product diversification by expanding into US stocks and AI hardware. The former reinforces the "fund custody and security" label in users' minds, while the latter differentiates itself in terms of "richness of tradable assets," with these two paths together forming a dual-line game of "safety vs. ecological breadth" in the current competition among leading platforms.
● Multi-Asset Integration and BTC's Role Transformation: As crypto exchanges integrate crypto assets with stocks and other markets, BTC's role in investment portfolios is gradually shifting from a "single high-volatility speculative target" to a core collateral asset and value anchor within the entire crypto ecosystem. Whether as the base asset of the security fund or as a foundational asset in a cross-asset margin system, BTC's function is transitioning from "betting on price fluctuations" to "serving as a foundational asset for risk and liquidity," a transformation that has profound implications for the medium to long-term pricing framework.
Who is Picking Up Retail Chips After Severe Volatility
● Chip Migration Path: In this round of liquidation, the $2.597 billion in passive liquidations and 570,000 traders being forcibly liquidated indicate that a large number of high-leverage retail traders and short-term funds have been forced to relinquish their chips; meanwhile, long-term funds, including SAFU, have actively increased their positions during the downturn, effectively completing a migration of chips from "high-leverage short-term players" to "low-leverage long-term holders." This process is not a one-time event but is continuously repeated and deepened through each instance of severe volatility.
● Price and Liquidity Reconstruction under Resonance: The simultaneous expiration of options, chain liquidations, and the accumulation by the security fund intertwine within the same time window, causing the price to be shaped in the short term by multiple passive trading logics: on one end is the options hedging aimed at approaching or deviating from the maximum pain point, on another end are the forced sell-offs triggered by insufficient margin, and on the other end is the low-frequency absorption by long-term funds. The final result is a more convoluted price path, but the market depth and chip structure are reshuffled and redistributed during the fluctuations, laying new support and resistance for subsequent market movements.
● Observational Framework of Risk-Return Structure: In the short term, investors need to recognize that in a high expiration volume options and high leverage environment, the price volatility range and rhythm are largely dominated by passive mechanisms, leading to a decrease in the win rate for chasing short-term directions; in the medium to long term, as more chips concentrate in institutions and security funds with stronger financial strength and risk control capabilities, the downside elasticity of BTC may be weakened, while the upside will increasingly rely on macro liquidity and incremental funds, forming a new risk-return pattern of "slower pullbacks, with unilateral rises more dependent on increments."
● Reassessing Leverage and Safety Signals: For individual participants, it is crucial to clearly distinguish between the "security fund thickening the buffer" and the "platform providing a price floor for the market," which are two entirely different concepts. The role of SAFU is to enhance the payout capability under extreme risks, not to guarantee any price range. High leverage amplifies returns in the short term but also exposes vulnerabilities in events like this round of resonance; how to control leverage multiples, set stop-losses, and diversify risks will determine whether one passively relinquishes chips or has the ability to participate in reconstruction at better price levels during the next round of severe volatility.
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