Bitcoin (BTC) Liquidation Wave Clears $152.97 Million as the Squeeze Flips to Shorts

$152.97 Million Wiped in a Day

Margin closes in a loop: a leveraged position gets shut by force, its mechanical unwind shoves the market one step further, and that shove triggers the next closure. Digital-asset derivatives ran that loop hard in the 24 hours to Tuesday morning, when $152.97 million in positions was forcibly closed and 68,742 traders were caught in the sweep, according to aggregated liquidation data. The Bitcoin (BTC) price ground its way to just under $80,000 in the same window, last changing hands at $79,927 and up 0.3% over 24 hours, yet the direction of the closures kept shifting as the session wore on. Over the full day, long positions absorbed the larger hit: $82.55 million, or 54% of the total, against $70.42 million in short closures, or 46%. Modest gains across major assets made the long-side damage look lopsided, a signature of intraday volatility rather than a clean trend. Bitcoin (BTC) itself led all coins with $35.82 million closed, split almost evenly between $17.72 million in longs and $18.10 million in shorts. Ethereum followed with $29.00 million, of which longs made up $16.02 million, or 55.2%. Together, the two largest assets accounted for roughly 42.4% of the day's total.

COINOTAG's own composite scoring frames where this wave sits. The nearest support, $79,398, grades 89 out of 100, and the first resistance above, $81,037, carries 86 out of 100 in the same pivot points model; spot trades between them at $79,927. Positioning stays one-sided: perp funding prints 0.0049% and the long/short account ratio reads 2.47, with 71.2% of accounts long. A push through $81,037 would force more short closures, while a drop back to $79,398 would restart the long-side unwind. The fuller Bitcoin technical analysis lists the deeper rungs at $74,978 and $71,880.

Shorts Took the Last 12 Hours

The 24-hour long bias hid a turn. In the most recent 12 hours, short closures reached $41.63 million of the $71.80 million total, a 58% share, and every shorter window kept that tilt: over four hours, shorts lost $9.36 million against $6.13 million for longs, and in the final hour $2.84 million against $2.05 million. As price worked back toward $80,000, positions betting on a fall were squeezed, and their forced buybacks pushed the market into the next round of closures with nobody choosing to pull the trigger. Exchange distribution concentrated the pain: Binance processed 47% of all closures, and the day's largest single order was a whale-sized $1.85 million Bitcoin (BTC) position shut on Hyperliquid's BTC-USD market. The altcoin ledger split by direction. Solana logged $6.27 million closed, about 78% of it longs, with the token at $100.64, down 0.44%, at the time of the reading. Zcash ran the other way, up 2.05% at $1,229.77 while $5.19 million was closed, 61.7% of it shorts. Hyperliquid rose 2.66% as roughly $1.15 million in shorts was cleared, and XRP and NEAR Protocol saw $1.88 million and $1.78 million closed respectively.

Where the Loop Broke

The machinery, not a market view, set the sequence. Longs were closed first because early volatility caught them, and the flip to shorts in the final 12 hours shows the same loop running in reverse once price recovered toward $81,037 resistance, a level traders have been selling into since the recent reversal from $85,000. With the composite trend still graded a downtrend and RSI at 40.29, each mechanical squeeze up invites fresh short margin, which is exactly how the cycle reloads. Traders who simply hold spot, a straight HODL stance, sit outside this machinery entirely. The sources record shorts still being closed in the last hour; the sequence had not been arrested, it had merely run through the long side first.