Crypto Suffers $1.6 Billion Liquidations As XRP, DOGE Down 10%

Data shows the cryptocurrency market has registered large liquidations in the past day as altcoins like Dogecoin and XRP have crashed.

According to data from CoinGlass, a mass amount of liquidations have piled up over on the derivatives side of the cryptocurrency sector during the last 24 hours.

“Liquidation” here refers to the forceful closure that any open contract undergoes when its bet fails enough to accumulate losses equal to a certain degree (the exact value of which may differ between platforms).

Below is a table that breaks down the relevant numbers related to the liquidations from the past day.

As is visible, there have been total liquidations of cryptocurrency-related contracts worth a whopping $1.56 billion in the past day. The long holders were involved in an overwhelming majority of this flush, with liquidations associated with them standing at $1.39 billion (almost 90% of the total).

The reason behind the large liquidations is the crash that the altcoin market has faced during this window, with many popular coins like XRP and Dogecoin being down double digits.

It would appear that many traders had set up bullish positions on the market, hoping that the recent momentum led by Bitcoin’s exploration to new highs would continue shortly. BTC has interestingly managed to limit its losses to just 2%, but evidently, the rest of the market hasn’t been so lucky.

As for which of the assets was responsible for the most liquidations, the below heatmap shows it.

Usually, Bitcoin leads the market liquidations, but it appears the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum has instead contributed the most towards the flush with $229 million in positions.

Dogecoin and XRP have followed BTC’s $173 million liquidations with flushes of $88 million and $68 million, respectively. Their large liquidations are likely due to their popularity and the notable scale of drawdown they have seen.

It would also seem that the speculative interest in the sector has been so deep recently that the small cap assets (referred to as ‘others’ in the heatmap) have added up to a massive $496 million liquidation.

Mass liquidation events aren’t particularly rare in the cryptocurrency sector, but today’s flush has been extraordinary even for the market’s standards.

These events happen from time to time because coins across the board generally display notable volatility, and a lot of speculators opt for risky amounts of leverage. These two conditions have been particularly pronounced recently, which is why the derivatives sector has exploded in this fashion.

At the time of writing, XRP is trading around $2.09, down almost 15% in the last seven days.