Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market experienced large-scale liquidations. According to Coinglass data, long positions worth nearly $165 million were liquidated, while short positions exceeding $240 million were also liquidated, totaling approximately $410 million.
This round of liquidations occurred following a brief period of bidirectional volatility in Bitcoin. The price first rose from around $80,000 to above $82,000, then dropped back below $81,000, resulting in the liquidation of highly leveraged short positions first, followed by some long positions that had chased the upward move.
Short positions were liquidated on a larger scale
From the structure, the amount of long liquidations exceeds that of short liquidations, indicating that highly leveraged short positions faced greater pressure during Bitcoin’s upward movement.
As illustrated in the text, if a short position is opened near $80,000, the liquidation price remains significantly distant under low leverage; however, when leverage increases to 25x, 50x, or higher, the liquidation line moves noticeably closer to the current price. Bitcoin rose above $82,000 during the night, sufficient to trigger the liquidation of a number of highly leveraged short positions.
After the pullback, long positions were also liquidated.
After the price surge, the market quickly gave back part of its gains. Following Bitcoin’s retest below $81,000, some long positions opened at higher levels were liquidated.
The article notes that the magnitude of this volatility was not particularly large, at approximately 3.7%. Under these conditions, the positions primarily liquidated were those with high leverage, rather than low-leverage or unleveraged positions. This also explains why hundreds of millions of dollars in positions were liquidated despite the relatively moderate market movement.
Higher leverage is more likely to trigger liquidation.
Leveraged trading inherently involves borrowing. If a position incurs losses, the platform will automatically close it before margin requirements are breached to prevent further losses.
The higher the leverage, the closer the liquidation price is to the entry price, making the position more susceptible to forced closure during short-term price fluctuations. In the cryptocurrency market, if the price swings rapidly up and down in a short period, highly leveraged long and short positions can both be quickly liquidated.
This data also indicates that a significant amount of short-term leveraged capital remains concentrated around Bitcoin’s key price levels. If price volatility continues, the scale of liquidations may further increase.