Bitcoin (BTC) Steadies Near $65,000 After Long Liquidation Dominance Hits 5-Year High

Long Liquidation Dominance Reaches 23.6%

Bitcoin (BTC) price steadied after Saturday's flush, changing hands near $65,090 at the time of writing, a 0.5% gain since the latest reading crossed the wire though still 0.7% lower over the past 24 hours. The calm carried an extreme behind it: long liquidation dominance on Bitcoin (BTC) reached 23.6% on 14 November, the highest print since 2021. Analyst Anıl (@anlcnc1) flagged the break in a chart shared on X on 15 November. The metric, used to gauge how much of a sell-off's forced-closure pressure lands on bullish leveraged positions, had failed for roughly a year to clear peaks near the 22% mark, topping out at 22.4%, 22% and 22.2% in successive episodes. In plain terms, the gauge asks which side of the leveraged book is taking the damage. On 14 November it pushed through that ceiling. The chart's previous reading of similar scale dates to 2021, when the indicator reached 23.9% before falling back; in the years after, spanning the cycle that followed the 2020 Bitcoin Halving, nothing came close. Since that 2021 extreme, the indicator's local peaks sat in the 22% range, each one falling short. The print makes it the heaviest long-side flush the Bitcoin market has seen in about five years. What the tape did after the flush matters as much as the flush itself, and here it did little dramatic: price drifted rather than extended the decline, holding the $65,000 area into Sunday. One precision note applies to the headline number. The shared chart does not explain how the 23.6% is calculated, so it should not be read as a claim that long trades made up 23.6% of the day's total liquidations. That narrower daily figure exists separately, and it points the same direction.

@anlcnc1 · X post

Anıl (@anlcnc1).

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The daily liquidation record for 14 November puts the dominance reading in dollar terms. Roughly $629 million of leveraged Bitcoin (BTC) positions were closed by force during the session, derivatives liquidation data shows. Of that total, $580 million came from long positions against $49.3 million from shorts, so about 92% of the day's Bitcoin liquidations hit traders positioned for a rise. The damage reached well beyond the largest asset. The whole market recorded close to $1.54 billion in forced closures that day, with long positions carrying $1.45 billion of the total and short closures amounting to roughly $90 million. Ethereum absorbed $424 million, Solana $91.8 million and XRP $45.3 million, a spread consistent with the pattern our altcoin liquidations tracking has shown in earlier flushes. The flush was a market-wide deleveraging, not a Bitcoin-specific event, with Ether carrying the second-largest bill. Shorts, by contrast, were barely touched: the $49.3 million closed on that side was a fraction of the long bill, an asymmetry that matches the dominance chart's message and confirms its direction with hard dollar figures. The mechanics behind these numbers are unforgiving. A leveraged long is a trade opened with borrowed funds in expectation of a price rise; when price falls past the point where collateral no longer covers the borrowed exposure, the venue closes the position automatically. Exchanges step in the moment maintenance margin is breached, and the market orders that result land on the bid side at the worst possible moment. Because one forced closure adds sell pressure that can trigger the next, such events compound in thin liquidity and accelerate a slide. Saturday's session, in which nine of every ten liquidated dollars came from the long side, fits that description. It also extends a rough stretch our desk has documented: a $1.6 billion liquidation week in which Bitcoin (BTC) defended its 200-week average, followed by a separate valuation alert built on MVRV below 1.2.

Positioning Still Leans Long

One thing the standing picture has not changed: accounts still lean bullish. Perp funding sits at 0.0027% and the long/short account ratio reads 3.37, with 77.1% of accounts on the long side; that ratio describes positioning, never the liquidation split, so it does not conflict with Saturday's long-side washout. COINOTAG's composite scoring puts the strongest support below the market at $62,978, scored 89 out of 100, with resistance at $65,746 scored 72; the full map sits in our Bitcoin technical analysis. Sentiment matches the caution: the Fear & Greed Index stood at 10, deep in extreme fear. Whether the steadiness near $65,000 matures into a recovery now depends on spot demand, from retail flows to any crypto whale willing to absorb sellers while holders inclined to HODL keep supply off the market. Buyer depth of the kind that let Coinbase absorb $1.08 billion of net selling has yet to reappear in force.