$200 Million In Crypto Longs Wiped Out As Altcoins Crash To Start Week

Data shows that the cryptocurrency derivatives sector has seen a high amount of liquidation during the past day as Ethereum and other altcoins plunged.

According to data from CoinGlass, liquidations have piled up on the cryptocurrency futures market in the last 24 hours. “Liquidation” here refers to the forceful closure that any open contract undergoes after it has accumulated losses of a certain degree.

When a large amount of liquidations occur at once, the event is popularly known as a squeeze. The chances of a squeeze taking place come down to two factors. The first is naturally the volatility, as a larger swing in the price would mean a wider span of contracts gets pushed into the red.

The other factor is leverage, a loan amount that derivatives market traders can opt to take against their initial collateral. Leverage is often many times the position itself, so the benefit of having it is that any profits earned are multiplied by the same factor. But as this also applies to losses, it’s easier to get liquidated with leverage if the bet doesn’t work out.

In the cryptocurrency sector, assets can often be volatile and positions tend to be overleveraged, so a squeeze can occur from time to time. During the past day, the market has once again seen a surge in volatility, which has led to yet another liquidation squeeze. Here is a table that breaks down the relevant numbers related to this event:

As is visible above, the cryptocurrency derivatives sector has registered a total of $268 million in liquidations during the last 24 hours. Out of these, $217 million of the positions involved were bullish bets.

The long contract holders taking the brunt of the liquidations is naturally down to the fact that the altcoins have gone through a price crash inside this window.

Now, here is a heatmap that displays how the contribution to the squeeze has looked from the individual assets:

Generally, Bitcoin (BTC) tops this list, but it would appear that the number one cryptocurrency has failed to make even the top two this time around. This is due to the fact that the coin has seen relatively flat movement during this crash of the altcoins.

Ethereum (ETH), the largest among the altcoins, has provided the largest share of liquidations at $56 million. Solana (SOL), which has faced the worst decline among the top 10 digital assets of 6%, has come second at $33 million.

Ethereum made some recovery during the weekend, but it seems the coin has already retraced those gains to start the new week as its price has gone down 4%, dropping to $2,700.