Bitcoin Leads $91.6 Million in Liquidations as Short Squeezes Dominate

Update 11:12 UTC: The anniversary framing also draws on a retrospective of the October 10, 2025 crash itself, when Bitcoin (BTC) plunged from around $122,000 to $105,000 within minutes, days after touching a record above $126,000, forcing roughly $19 billion in liquidations.

Shorts Absorb 62% of Forced Exits

Leveraged traders lost $91,633,750 to liquidations across the crypto market in the 24 hours to 06:55 UTC on Saturday, October 10, and the damage landed mostly on the short side. Aggregate derivatives data shows short positions made up 62.39% of total forced exits, roughly 1.7 times the long-side share. Longs accounted for $34,467,110 of the wipeout while shorts carried $57,166,640, a spread that points to margin sellers, not margin buyers, being the cohort caught as prices drifted higher through the window.

A liquidation closes a leveraged position by force when the exchange margin engine no longer considers it adequately collateralized, and a cluster of them in one direction is what traders call a squeeze. When shorts are liquidated, their forced buy-backs add upward pressure to the tape, which fits the mild upward drift in the largest assets while the positions unwound. The tally was taken with headline prices close to flat. The Bitcoin price stood at $82,729 at the read, up 0.30% over 24 hours, and the asset trades near $82,700 in our live monitoring now, a 0.2% gain on the day. Ethereum (ETH) sat at $2,493, down 0.04% over the same span. Among the other majors, Solana (SOL) slipped 0.71%, Hyperliquid (HYPE) fell 1.69%, XRP added 0.44% and Zcash (ZEC) edged up 0.08% in the 24-hour frame.

The weekend squeeze sits against a wider anniversary backdrop: traders did not actually cut leverage ahead of the 10/10 date. CryptoQuant's Estimated Leverage Ratio, which weighs open bets against exchange-held Bitcoin (BTC), climbed from about 0.234 on October 3 to roughly 0.256 by October 8, and has eased only to about 0.250 since. Eric Conner, co-author of EIP-1559, had argued the market deleveraged for the anniversary, saying "bear market PTSD" drove mass underexposure, but total open interest still fell from about $154 billion to roughly $142 billion, per CoinGlass. Funding conditions look calmer than a year ago, with Deribit's Bitcoin rate near 7.1% annualized against 26.9% before the 2025 crash, and Glassnode places the next cluster of leveraged bets near $75,000.

The anniversary framing also draws on a retrospective of the October 10, 2025 crash itself, when Bitcoin plunged from around $122,000 to $105,000 within minutes, days after touching a record above $126,000, forcing roughly $19 billion in liquidations. Mark Connors of Risk Dimensions, who previously ran a hedge fund positioning product at Credit Suisse, told the outlet the move was "all derivatives," adding that "paper bitcoin again is alive and well and governs the near term," and warned "there's still a chance that you can have an October 10th for sure." He argued the four-year cycle "has changed" and can no longer be relied on for as much signal. Hyperion Decimus co-founder Chris Sullivan advised avoiding leverage, watching open interest, funding rates and sentiment, and moving long-term holdings into self-custody; the market "did bend; it didn't break," Connors said.

Bitcoin Carries the Largest Coin Total

Bitcoin (BTC) carried the largest single-coin figure. The leading asset recorded $46.89 million in liquidations, 72% of them shorts, the most short-heavy profile among the top three coins. Ethereum followed with $20.61 million, 55% of it from short positions. Solana came third at $6.79 million, split almost evenly at 50% shorts. Below the top three the mix tilted sharply against sellers: NEAR saw $3.91 million liquidated with 76% from shorts, Zcash, another proof-of-work asset, recorded $3.87 million at 61% shorts, and Dogecoin, the best-known memecoin, had $1.47 million with 62% shorts. Two outliers ran the other way. XRP's $1.96 million total was 52% longs, and SanDisk (SNDK), a tokenized stock on the board, drew 97% of its $1.835 million from longs, the most lopsided long-side print of the session.

The figures follow the top-20 liquidation table compiled by derivatives data platform CoinGlass, a sum of the most-liquidated coins and exchanges rather than the whole market, so the market-wide figure runs larger still. The eight coins detailed above carry about $87.3 million of the total, and the rest of the table absorbed the remaining roughly $4.3 million. Prices in the tally use CoinMarketCap marks, and aggregation methods differ across providers and venues, so other dashboards can post different totals for the same window. The top-20 cutoff also excludes long-tail tokens, which matters most in sessions where a small-cap funding dislocation drives outsized exits on a minor asset; nothing of that kind surfaced in this window's upper ranks.

A Squeeze on a Weekend Tape

The short-side concentration, 62.39% market-wide and 72% in Bitcoin alone, reads as a squeeze rather than a rout: prices did not need to fall for the pain to land, and Bitcoin ends the window marginally higher near $82,700. With weekend trading volume thinner than weekday averages, forced exits can run further on lighter books than the same flow would on a busy session. No exchange or protocol has announced remediation, reimbursement or an incident review connected to the session; the tally simply resets, and the next funding cycle will show whether leveraged shorts rebuild or step aside.