Crypto Liquidations Strike Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) Traders, $279M Lost

The crypto derivatives market faced significant turbulence over the past weekend, resulting in the loss of $279 million from leveraged positions.

The crypto derivatives market encountered immense turbulence over the past weekend, as a total of $279 million was lost from leveraged positions. According to data from blockchain analytics company CoinGlass, this massive wipeout affected around 80,590 traders, primarily on centralized exchanges like OKX, Binance, and Bybit.

Derivatives traders on OKX lost about $78 million during the storm, while Binance and Bybit were hit with approximately $11 million and $2 million, respectively. Notably, the largest single liquidation order was executed on OKX, involving a BTC-USDT-SWAP valued at $22.24 million.

Bitcoin traders were at the heart of this liquidation storm, with over $115 million in liquidated positions. Traders who were shorting BTC, expecting its price to decline further, experienced the greatest losses, as over $66 million was wiped out in 24 hours.

On the other hand, long traders, who had bet on Bitcoin price rising, faced losses of around $49 million.

Moreover, Ethereum derivatives traders also faced a significant sell-off, as over $50 million in ETH positions were liquidated. Interestingly, the impact of the liquidation was more severe on long traders, who incurred losses of nearly $34 million, compared to short traders who lost just over $17 million.

Other cryptocurrencies such as Solana and Notcoin collectively faced more than $32 million in liquidations over the weekend. These figures illustrate the broad-based sell-off that affected a wide array of digital assets.

This recent wave of liquidations follows closely on the heels of one of the largest liquidation events in Bitcoin’s history, which occurred on Friday, July 5.

According to data from CoinGecko, Bitcoin derivatives traders experienced a massive liquidation of $226 million, making it the highest liquidation since the collapse of FTX in November 2022. This liquidation shook the entire crypto market, with the meme coin sector bearing the brunt of the losses. Meme coins based on the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Base shed about 25.2% of their market value on Friday.

CoinGecko reported that digital assets in the meme category such as Brett (BRETT), Toshi (TOSHI), Degen (DEGEN), Basenji (BENJI), and ChompCoin (CHOMP) suffered significant losses ranging from 19% to 30% of their value.

Meanwhile, this market brutality could be attributed to several factors, including aggressive leveraged trading, massive sell-offs, sharp price movements, and cascading stop-loss orders.

Over the past weeks, the German government has been offloading its Bitcoin holdings to different exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken. The country intends to sell about 50,000 bitcoins and has been silently moving the assets in batches since June. The crypto assets were confiscated in January 2024 from a piracy website in 2013 that violated the country’s Copyright Act. In addition to the German government, Japanese exchange Mt. Gox, which was exploited for hundreds of bitcoins worth close to $460 million in 2014, and now close to $9 billion, has finally started repaying victims of the incident after a decade of waiting.