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Data shows the cryptocurrency derivatives market has seen liquidations of a whopping $1.7 billion as Bitcoin and other assets have plunged.
Last week, things looked to be on the up for Bitcoin as its price approached the $118,000 level, but the end of the week brought a setback for the coin. The new week appears to have only accelerated the decline, as the cryptocurrency has opened Monday with a sharp plummet to the low $112,000 levels.
The below chart shows how Bitcoin’s recent performance has looked.
The bearish momentum hasn’t been limited to Bitcoin. Ethereum (ETH) and the altcoins have also plummeted during the past day, with most of them observing larger losses than BTC. Among the top coins, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Chainlink (LINK) have suffered the largest drops at 10.5% and 9%, respectively.
Like is usually the case, the market-wide volatility has meant that chaos has ensued over on the derivatives exchanges.
According to data from CoinGlass, the cryptocurrency derivatives market has witnessed an extraordinary amount of liquidations during the past day. “Liquidation” here refers to the forceful closure that any open contract undergoes after it has amassed losses of a certain degree (as set by the platform).
Since the price action has been majorly to the downside during the past day, the positions incurring losses would be the bullish bets. And indeed, as the below table shows, the latest liquidations have been extremely lopsided toward long contracts.
In total, the cryptocurrency market has seen a flush of $1.67 billion inside this window, out of which $1.59 billion of the liquidations involved long positions. Only about 5% of the liquidations ($83 million) affected shorts.
In terms of the individual symbols, Ethereum seems to have contributed the most to the squeeze with $496 million in liquidations.
Bitcoin generally tops this chart, but the asset has seen a flush of just $285 million, more than $200 million less than ETH’s figure. The latter’s dominance may be a result of its sharper price decline of 7%, as well as the fact that the cryptocurrency has been getting more speculative attention lately.
Solana (SOL) has been the third largest asset in terms of the metric, with a figure of about $95 million. XRP (XRP), which has a larger market cap than SOL, is behind at $78 million. Dogecoin rounds out the top five with liquidations of $61 million.
Mass liquidation events aren’t exactly a rare sight in the cryptocurrency sector, owing to the fact that coins can be volatile, and leverage can be easily accessible. Even for the standards of the market, however, this latest squeeze has been an outlier in its scale.
