The cryptocurrency market crashed sharply in the past 24 hours, triggering $1.68 billion in liquidations as leveraged bets were wiped out on major exchanges, according to data from CoinGlass.
Approximately 267,370 traders were forced to exit their positions, with long positions accounting for a staggering $1.56 billion, or nearly 93% of the total liquidations.
Shorts accounted for just $118 million, indicating how one-sided positioning had become before the move lower.
Bitcoin and ether led the damage. BTC alone recorded around $780 million in liquidations, while ETH followed with more than $414 million, according to liquidation heatmap data. The biggest hit was an $80.57 million BTC-USDT position in HTX, a reminder that even deep liquidity doesn’t protect oversized leverage when momentum shifts.
The pain was concentrated in places with a lot of perpetual presence. Hyperliquid topped the list with $598 million in liquidations, more than 94% of them long-term, reflecting how aggressively traders had shifted toward bullish bets. Bybit followed with $339 million, and Binance posted $181 million, with long exposure dominating all three.
Liquidations occur when leveraged traders can no longer meet margin requirements and exchanges forcibly close positions to prevent further losses.
In fast markets, this becomes reflexive: fire sales drive prices down, which triggers more liquidations, fueling a cascade. That feedback loop is exactly what happened here.
For traders, liquidation data is important because it exposes where leverage was concentrated and where risk was eliminated.
Long, intense sell-offs often mark the elimination of speculative excess, resetting funding rates and open interest. That doesn’t mean the bottom has been reached, but it does mean that the weak hands are gone and future price action is less distorted by forced flows.
The broader conclusion is that the move was likely driven not by new bearish conviction but by a breakout of leverage. When almost everything on the board is long, the market doesn’t need bad news: it just needs gravity.
