Bitcoin and the altcoins have plummeted during the past day, leading to the liquidation of a large amount of crypto longs in derivatives markets.
According to data from CoinGlass, the past day’s volatility in the crypto market has been accompanied by a swath of liquidations. The “liquidation” of a contract occurs when it accumulates losses of a certain degree and is forcibly shut down by the exchange. In the digital asset sector, volatility tends to be high, so a large number of liquidations take place on a regular basis. The last 24 hours involved one such volatile event, as the table below depicts.
In total, the crypto market has faced $874 million in liquidations within this window. Out of these, long contracts have made up for an overwhelming share: $788 million.
The reason for liquidations being this lopsided naturally lies in the price action that has developed over the last day. Bitcoin saw a sudden drop from $95,500 to a low of $93,000, while Ethereum went from $3,350 to $3,200. In percentage terms, these drops aren’t too big, but the rapid nature of them is what triggered the liquidations.
The source of the crash could lie in revitalized US-EU tariff tensions. As reported by Reuters, President Donald Trump vowed over the weekend to implement tariffs on eight European nations.
Starting February 1st, goods from Denmark, Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland will face an additional 10% import tariff. If the US isn’t allowed to acquire the Danish territory of Greenland, these tariffs will go up to 25% on June 1st.
2025 already saw several events where tariff-related uncertainty affected the crypto market, so it’s not surprising to see that the latest news has also been accompanied by volatility. As is usually the case, the latest market volatility has led to Bitcoin-related contracts occupying a disproportionate share of liquidations.
As is visible in the above heatmap, Bitcoin has seen liquidations of around $233 million in the past day. Ethereum, the next-ranked coin in this category, has witnessed $156 million in contracts being involved.
From the altcoins, Solana, XRP, and Dogecoin have ranked the highest with $61 million, $41 million, and $35 million in liquidations, respectively. SOL being ahead of XRP despite being smaller in market cap may be because of its 6% plunge being larger than the latter’s 4% drop.
Bitcoin has seen a slight rebound from its low as the cryptocurrency’s price is now back at $93,100.
