The past 24 hours have witnessed a wave of liquidations in the crypto market erasing hundreds of millions of dollars in positions. Statistics indicate that 121,216 traders were liquidated in the period, depicting the increase of volatility and aggressive leverage in the key exchanges. The numbers show that there is a great disparity between long and short positions with the majority of the losses incurred by long traders.
The highest single crypto liquidation order was on Binance in the BTCUSDT pair amounting to $11.79 million. This highlights the fact that drastic changes in the price of Bitcoin are still causing cascading liquidations especially to leveraged traders.
Exchange Crypto Liquidations Reveal Long Bias
Exchange-level data indicates that long positions were predominant in all major platforms in liquidations. Hyperliquid had the biggest liquidation volume of $206.67 million then Bybit with $104.64 million and then Binance with $104.33 million. Bitget had recorded liquidations of $58.09 million and Gate recorded liquidations of $50.56 million. OKX was next with $39.84 million of liquidation, HTX was at $21.37 million liquidation while Aster was at $6.04 million in liquidation.
In these exchanges, long liquidations took the lead in terms of percentage over shorts. Hyperliquid reported the highest short liquidations of 58.32%, and the lowest longs of 41.68%, and is the only platform that had a fairly balanced distribution. But Bybit recorded 82.95% long liquidations and only 17.05% short liquidations. Binance recorded 73.76% longs to 26.24% shorts whereas Bitget recorded 83.18% longs and just 16.82% shorts.
OKX saw 68.31% longs while HTX recorded 75.72% longs. Gate had 81.19% long liquidations and 18.81% shorts. Aster also followed the trend with 67.22% long liquidations compared to 32.78% shorts. This imbalance was widespread and indicated that traders were mostly placed in upwards direction of price fluctuations prior to the market reversing.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Lead Asset Liquidations
Bitcoin is listed among the top liquidated crypto assets with a total amount of $245.54 million or about 3.42K BTC. Ethereum came in at the second spot with $126.44 million liquidations which is approximately 56.19K ETH. Solana was third with $19.79 million, or about 234.39K SOL.
There were other significant crypto liquidations of other assets albeit on smaller scale. ZEC saw $12.85 million in liquidations, amounting to about 39.94K tokens. HYPE registered $4.49 million and XRP came close behind with $4.46 million. RED reported liquidations amounting to $4.27 million and DOGE registered $3.43 million.
Towards the bottom of the list, TAO reported on a $2.12 million liquidation. SUI registered $1.55 million, DRIFT registered $1.42 million and ADA completed the top assets with $1.22 million liquidations. These data show that although Bitcoin and Ethereum have a strong crypto market share, altcoins too are strongly affected in times of volatility.
Crypto Market Volatility Triggers Cascade Events
The magnitude of liquidations implies that the market had experienced violent price changes in a limited period. This tends to cause cascade effects, where the forced liquidations cause a further move in the same direction of prices, causing further liquidations. The fact that the long liquidations prevailed indicates that the market was probably heading down and the bullish traders were taken by surprise.
One of the major causes of these events is high leverage. With excessive leverage on the part of crypto traders, any minor fluctuations in price can lead to forced liquidations. The recent statistics shed light on the speed at which the market mood can change and turn the optimism into massive losses.
