Bitcoin (BTC) Leads 24-Hour Crypto Liquidations as Shorts Take 63.54% Share

Shorts Take the Brunt

The damage in the past 24 hours did not spread evenly across the market — it landed hardest on one side of the derivatives book. Aggregated liquidation data for the window ending 08:00 KST on September 3 (23:00 UTC, September 2) records approximately $110.38 million in leveraged positions force-closed across the 20 most-liquidated assets. Short positions bore 63.54% of that flush: roughly $70.14 million of bearish bets were wiped out, about 1.7 times the $40.25 million in long positions closed against their holders. A short liquidation, briefly, is the forced repurchase of a borrowed position when price moves against it — so a session in which shorts dominate the wipeout points to an upward squeeze rather than a sell-off. The mechanics are unforgiving: as price climbs, bears must buy back borrowed coins at progressively worse levels, and every forced buy adds fuel to the move that trapped them. That is the pattern the data shows for Bitcoin (BTC), trading near $78,000 at the time of writing and sitting at the top of the liquidation table for the period, with Ethereum (ETH) second and Solana (SOL) and Zcash (ZEC) further down. The skew carries a clear positioning read-through: when 63.54 cents of every liquidated dollar belonged to a short, the deleveraging wave was not the familiar long-flush sell-off that drags spot prices lower, but an upward capitulation of bearish leveraged traders. Sessions of this shape often mark exhaustion points for crowded short books, and the forced buying they generate can prop up spot prices even while broader sentiment, tracked by the crypto Fear and Greed Index, stays fragile. The support and resistance map overhead is now the operative question — whether squeeze-driven demand has the depth to absorb supply at the nearest resistance shelf, or whether the forced flow fades and leaves the market to reprice.

Bitcoin Tops the $110M Table

Bitcoin accounted for the largest single share of the flush at $38.85 million, and the imbalance inside that figure was extreme: short liquidations made up 76%, or about $29.56 million — roughly three of every four Bitcoin positions erased belonged to traders positioned for a decline. Ethereum followed at $33.06 million, but its breakdown was the most balanced of the majors, with shorts at 52%, a near 1:1 split between trapped bears and trapped bulls. Solana logged $7.17 million in liquidations, 68% of them short, while Zcash recorded $5.57 million, 64% short, and XRP closed the crypto list at $3.33 million, 67% short. The table's outliers confirm the flush was not a purely crypto affair: a listed storage-hardware equity, SanDisk (SNDK), recorded $4.12 million in liquidations, 65% of them long; gold (XAU) saw $3.88 million, 89% short; and WTI crude logged $2.41 million, 82% short. Methodology matters when reading these numbers. The totals are the sum of the 20 most-liquidated instruments and venues, not the aggregate market, so the true all-market liquidation figure is almost certainly higher. Prices are referenced to CoinMarketCap at collection time, and differences in how each exchange and product classifies and timestamps forced closures mean other aggregators can report somewhat different values for the same window. For spot traders, the practical read is where the leverage sat: the concentration in Bitcoin shorts shows the squeeze originated in the deepest, most liquid market, with altcoin liquidations arriving largely as pass-through volatility as leveraged positions across DeFi lending markets and wider Web3 trading venues unwound in sequence. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Where the Squeeze Turns Next

COINOTAG's reading of the derivatives record is that the ratio defines the session, not the dollar total: 63.54% of the $110.38 million sat on the short side, and inside Bitcoin's $38.85 million segment that share stretched to 76%. Forced short covering of this scale tends to be self-limiting — once the crowded side is cleared out, the mechanical buying stops and the market must trade on fresh conviction rather than liquidation flow. The actionable marker is therefore the nearest support shelf below spot: if BTC holds the zone the squeeze pushed it into, the flush reads as bearish-positioning cleanup ahead of the next leg; if the forced bid fades and that level gives way, reclaimed ground can be handed back as quickly as it was won.