$257M Crypto Longs Rekt After BTC Crash

Data shows the cryptocurrency derivatives market has seen a huge amount of liquidations in the past day as Bitcoin has crashed under $58,000.

Bitcoin Has Registered A Plunge Of More Than 4% In The Past 24 Hours

After a bearish June, investors were hoping this new month of July would bring about a turnaround for the asset, and while the month did start with a bounce, it would appear that things have returned to being in line with the prior tone.

Bitcoin has now not only lost the recovery it had made to start the month, but it has also added to its losses, as its price has slipped under $58,000 with a crash of over 4% in the past day. The below chart shows how the cryptocurrency’s recent performance has looked like.

The price of the coin appears to have been sliding down over the past month | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

In this latest plunge, BTC had even briefly gone below the $57,000 level, but at least for now, the coin has rebounded back to $57,700. As is usually the case, this crash in the original cryptocurrency has also brought down the rest of the market, with many altcoins seeing even deeper losses. Given all this chaos in the sector, it’s not surprising to see that the derivatives side has seen a wild day of its own.

Cryptocurrency Derivatives Have Just Seen A Mass Liquidation Event

According to data from CoinGlass, the cryptocurrency derivatives market has observed liquidations of more than $294 million in the last 24 hours. “Liquidation” here naturally refers to the forceful closure that any contract undergoes by its platform after it has amassed losses of a certain degree.

Here is a table that shows what the breakdown of this latest mass liquidation event has been like:

Looks like longs have taken the majority of the beating in this window | Source: CoinGlass

As is visible above, long contract holders alone have contributed $257 million towards these liquidations, equivalent to more than 87% of the total. This lopsided derivatives flush is obviously a result of the sharp price action towards the downside that the market as a whole has seen in the past day.

Interestingly, $53 million of these liquidations occurred during the last four hours, despite the fact that Bitcoin has more or less calmed down in this window. This would suggest that speculators have been aggressively betting in their attempt to catch the bottom.

As for how the liquidations have looked in terms of contributions from the individual symbols, Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) have expectedly been leading the charts.

The breakdown of the liquidations in the last 24 hours by symbol | Source: CoinGlass

BTC and ETH have a gap of just $20 million between each other, but the drop to the third largest contributor, Solana (SOL), is a massive $59 million. Thus, it would appear that speculation has recently been focused on the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Featured image from Dall-E, CoinGlass.com, chart from TradingView.com