That dude from The Big Short says crypto experienced a 'collateral death spiral' as bitcoin hits a 16-month low, while other analysts predict worse to come

I'm writing about cryptocurrency again, which means bitcoin's either gone massively up in value, or it's in the middle of a, err, "significant downturn."

Well whaddaya know, it's the latter. The world's most headline-friendly cryptocurrency dropped in value below $70,000 per coin on Thursday for the first time since 2024, with its losses overall this year totalling more than 20 percent. The reasons why are complicated, but famous hedge fund manager Michael Burry has some ideas.

You know, the guy portrayed by Christian Bale in 2015's The Big Short. Burry took to his paid subscriber Substack page to declare that crypto was experiencing a "collateral death spiral", thanks to "sky high leverage" on crypto exchanges due to rising metal prices, which in turn meant that "as the crypto collateral fell, the tokenized metals had to be sold" (via Coindesk).

To understand what's happening here, I need to explain tokenised metals, so strap in. According to information I learned this morning (I have so little interest in crypto it's physically painful), tokenised metals are essentially blockchain representations of assets like gold, platinum and silver.

They can be full asset-backed tokens, where each one corresponds to a specific amount of valuable metal in a vault, fractional ownership tokens, where investors can own fractions of a large reserve, or commodity-linked digital securities, where the tokens are linked to derivatives, or revenue-sharing agreements tied to metal production or sales.

Apparently, at least. Anyway, tokenized silver futures are said to be particularly volatile at the moment, due to supply constraints and increased demand, and the price of silver had already risen by over 157% over the course of 2025. Traders bet on silver going up and up, and… you can probably guess what happened next.

Silver values plunged (as did gold), positions automatically closed, and bitcoin sank with it. Albeit, with silver outpacing the famous cryptocurrency on its way down. "It was reported that tokenized silver futures liquidations actually exceeded bitcoin liquidations on one crypto market, called, ironically, Hyperliquid", said Murray. Ho ho ho.

As crypto and financial markets are fiendishly difficult to analyse, it's very likely not the only reason why bitcoin took a tumble. However, tumble it has, and where bitcoin goes, the rest of the crypto market has a tendency to follow. As of the time of writing, bitcoin is currently falling below the $68,000 mark, with more than $1 billion worth of crypto positions liquidated over the past 24 hours.

And according to John Blank, chief equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, bitcoin could go a lot lower yet. "Generally speaking, a bitcoin winter is 12 to 18-months long. These are well understood technical features," said Blank, speaking to CNBC. So, at $76,000 [per bitcoin] from $125,000, which was the peak, we can get to $40,000."

"We can get there very quickly, or more likely, we can get there over the next six to eight months."

Long gone are the days when crypto was considered a pure speculative investment for tech nerds, as the cryptocurrency market as a whole is now a big mainstream financial deal, and increasingly linked to real-world assets with real-world effects. And while I'm the complete opposite of an expert on this topic, I can tell you this seems like a bad thing. Or good, depending on your position on crypto. You decide.