Leveraged Longs Take 85% of $251 Million in Crypto Liquidations Over 24 Hours

A $251 Million Long Squeeze

Leveraged positions worth about $251 million were forcibly closed across the crypto market in the 24 hours through Saturday morning, and nearly nine of every ten dollars of the damage fell on traders positioned for prices to rise. Derivatives liquidation data from CoinGlass, covering the 20 most heavily liquidated assets, put the total at $251.14 million as of 06:56 UTC on October 24, which is 15:56 in Korea. Long positions absorbed $213.31 million of that, or 84.94% of the whole, roughly 5.6 times the $37.83 million erased from short positions. The mechanism is mechanical rather than dramatic: when a margin trading position no longer holds the collateral an exchange requires, the venue closes it automatically and the loss is booked at whatever price the order book offers. The flush tracked a broad but shallow slide. At the moment of the reading, Bitcoin traded at $80,666, down 1.38% over 24 hours, and Ethereum stood at $2,374, 1.35% lower. Across the wider top tier, Solana was down 2.46%, Hyperliquid's HYPE token 2.09%, XRP 3.04% and Zcash 4.84% over the same window. Our live monitoring now shows Bitcoin near $80,800, down about 1.4% on the day, with Ethereum around $2,380, off roughly 1.3%, so spot has moved little since the snapshot was taken. Liquidation counts capture only positions that were actually force-closed; the far larger stock of open leveraged exposure that merely lost value goes unmeasured. Even so, an 84.94% long share is a complete answer to which side of the market was carrying the leverage: for every dollar shorts lost, longs lost about five and a half.

Where the Liquidations Landed

Bitcoin carried the largest single-asset total at $90.88 million, and the skew inside that number was sharper than the market average: longs made up about 89% of it, close to $81.22 million. Ethereum followed with $60.64 million, 83% of it long-side. The smaller rows tell the positioning story more plainly than the leaders do. Zcash's $15.55 million in liquidations was 81% longs, Solana's $12.70 million was 92% long, and NEAR's $7.87 million was 93% long, meaning holders of those assets were overwhelmingly riding the decline rather than betting against it. Gold and silver sit oddly in that list, because they are not crypto at all: their presence shows the same leveraged long positioning had been built across commodities too, and unwound in the same window. Gold saw $9.38 million liquidated, 98% of it long-side; silver saw $9.33 million, 94% long. WTI crude is the outlier: of its $8.05 million in closures, 99% came from shorts, the one listed asset where traders had positioned for a fall and were caught by a rise. The skew also has a mechanical market impact: a long liquidation is a market sell executed by an exchange's engine, so the $213 million in long closures added that much selling pressure during the same hours prices were already sliding. Two caveats frame every figure above. The totals are the sum of the top 20 liquidated assets and exchanges as CoinGlass compiles them, not the entire market, so different aggregations produce different numbers depending on how individual venues classify and report forced closures. Prices in the snapshot referenced CoinMarketCap rates, another reason two desks quoting the same hour can disagree on the level.

What the 85% Long Share Says

The distribution reads as a market that had been buying weakness on leverage. Traders who add long exposure into a grind lower, the chase pattern usually labeled FOMO, are the ones a one-sided liquidation print tends to clear out first, and the 5.6-to-1 long share suggests that is what happened here. The metals rows point the same way: gold and silver longs unwound alongside crypto longs, which fits a broad pullback in risk rather than a failure specific to any single asset or platform. Forced closures also add to the day's trading volume without a counterparty choosing to trade, so the tape overstates organic activity during the flush. Since the 06:56 UTC reading, spot has barely moved, leaving whatever long leverage survived the flush to carry the same directional risk into the weekend.