**Is the Pinning Really a Dump? Not Necessarily**

Looking at the three instant pinning events on BTC today, many people's first reaction is "It's a dump again." But a careful comparison reveals that this is fundamentally different from traditional dumping. Usually, a dump involves large funds continuously selling off, order books being broken through layer by layer, and a sustained downtrend. In contrast, pinning is the exact opposite — instantly breaking through support levels and then immediately rebounding, often within no more than 5 seconds. If you're not watching the chart closely, you might hardly notice anything happened.

**Why do market makers love to do this?**

The first reason is efficiency. High-leverage longs tend to cluster in specific areas. A precise pin can trigger a large number of automatic stop-loss liquidations instantly, and market makers don't need to bear the cost of subsequent market stabilization. The second reason is arbitrage opportunities — according to on-chain data exposure, some market makers can even pre-position short orders 30 seconds before the pin, then explode long positions worth $360 million within 15 seconds, and immediately close the positions for profit. The third angle is information gathering — by quickly draining liquidity, they can identify retail traders' stop-loss clusters and true support levels, preparing for larger moves later.

In essence, this is exploiting the gray areas of the rules and leveraging capital advantages, turning the market into a cash machine. Retail traders, if they only complain afterward, will still be unable to escape next time.

**Where do these pinning events happen?**

Looking at today's three pinning locations reveals the clues — they are all carefully designed traps. Some are at retail traders' psychological support levels ("It shouldn't fall further here"), which ironically are the most disaster-prone zones for liquidation; some are right at the cost basis of recent re-entries, where unrealized gains instantly turn into unrealized losses, crushing traders' confidence; others are directly targeting contract dense zones, using data advantages to trigger chain stop-losses precisely.

The March 2025 pinning event is a very representative case: market makers preemptively reduced buy orders by 83%, while deliberately delaying the exchange's circuit breaker mechanism, perfectly creating a pinning window. This was not an accident but a carefully planned strategy.

**What should retail traders do?**

Since this tactic is so widespread, understanding the principle is the most basic form of self-defense. Don't blindly believe in ideas like "support levels will definitely hold," because experienced funds have long regarded these levels as hunting grounds.