Have you ever thought about it? The ones who care the most about BTC prices across the entire network are not investors, but the exchanges themselves.

This may sound counterintuitive. But the logic is very clear—if BTC were to plummet straight to zero, the deepest damage wouldn't come from a black swan event, but from CEXs being completely kicked out of the game. Why? Because at that moment, all liquidity pressures would erupt simultaneously, forcing all exchanges to forcibly release their held BTC, which would ultimately end up in the hands of institutions. The result is that all CEXs would disappear from the ecosystem stage in an instant, never to return.

Even more heartbreaking is that those exchanges that entered as institutional investors early on would end up holding no BTC at all. And no matter how low the price drops, CEXs would never be profitable again—they would fall into the same predicament as retail investors. Market capitalization would no longer rise, and their survival space would be completely squeezed.

This is why the threat of a bear market to CEXs is deadly. It’s not just about paper losses, but about being marginalized from the entire ecosystem. Once a crisis truly hits, it could lead to a collective collapse of exchanges.

On the flip side, the ongoing suppression of BTC prices actually poses a real threat to the exchanges. The outcome of this game will be far more realistic than we imagine.