Bitcoin (BTC) Suffers $1.3 Billion in Forced Liquidations in Monday Selloff

$1.3 Billion Wiped Out on Monday

Roughly $1.3 billion in leveraged positions were forcibly liquidated on Monday, Oct 26, after the Bitcoin (BTC) price gave way beneath the $80,000 mark during the New York session. Weekend trading had already carried the coin down from about $84,800 to near $79,100, and the Monday session broke that psychological floor as well. The tally makes this one of the larger single-day deleveraging events of the quarter. The mechanism matters: when price falls fast, positions built with borrowed margin hit maintenance thresholds and are closed automatically through market order types, adding sell pressure to the very move that set them off. Forced selling of this kind concentrates in contract trading books, which is why the response was so violent on thin weekend liquidity. Weak spot buying did the rest: without fresh bids absorbing the forced supply, each liquidation wave found a thinner book on the way down. Three pressures compounded the break: the cascade itself, spot bids absent at the lows, and a split in institutional flows that starved the rebound of follow-through. Traders tracking Bitcoin price action noted that pockets of resting liquidity above certain levels offered a technical base for recovery, but with no visible improvement in spot demand the market settled into a cautious wait. The Federal Reserve's pending rate decision now dominates the agenda, and whether Bitcoin (BTC) can reclaim and hold its heavier resistance zones is the question positioning is built around. The tape has answered part of it already: the price stands at $81,548, up 2.24% over the past 24 hours, back above the level that failed on Monday, though the $1.3 billion liquidation figure remains the session's defining number.

Long Accounts 66% of the Book

COINOTAG's composite level scoring puts the nearest support at $80,155, rated 84 out of 100, and the nearest resistance at $82,233, rated 94 out of 100; a sustained close above that resistance would be the first clean signal that Monday's damage is repaired. Derivatives data shows accounts 66% long against 34% short, with a funding rate of just 0.0071%, so leverage is cheap and the book leans long into resistance. Account counts overweight small wallets, which means the crypto whale share of positioning is not directly measured there. The full level map sits in our Bitcoin technical analysis.

ETF Flows Thinned Through Last Week

Institutional demand did not hold its early strength. Spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs took in roughly $1.075 billion at the start of last week, an opening that looked like the return of the institutional bid, only for about $774 million to flow back out as the days passed. The week's net came to about $301 million, positive but thin, a pattern that reads as repositioning rather than accumulation. The bid has come back quickly before: on an earlier streak, spot ETFs drew $286 million in two days. Broader market data from the break session put total crypto market capitalization near $2.68 trillion, down 0.61% on the day, while 24-hour volume jumped 84.35% to $68.42 billion, a combination consistent with traders repositioning fast under volatility. Bitcoin's market dominance held near 60.0% and the Fear and Greed Index printed 43 in the wake of the selloff, inside neutral territory, so sentiment has not tipped into capitulation. Longer-term holders who HODL through drawdowns are the usual source of the spot demand whose absence defined the low, and there is no sign of it returning yet. One named view frames the downside: analyst CryptoMichNL has argued that a failure to clear $81,000 sends the price back toward the $78,400–$79,100 band, with a slide below $76,000 possible if that zone fails to attract bids. With the Federal Reserve's rate decision pending, macro expectations alone can widen volatility in both directions. The liquidation record stands at roughly $1.3 billion for the Monday break, reported as a single total with no published split between the sides; until a cleaner breakdown or a stronger spot bid arrives, that figure is the yardstick the next session will be measured against.