Longs Absorb 70-80% of $117 Million in Crypto Liquidations

A $117 Million Flush Without a Single Trigger

Traders betting on further upside carried the damage. Long positions made up 70% to 80% of the roughly $117 million in crypto liquidations recorded across derivatives markets in the 24 hours between October 25 and October 26, according to liquidation figures circulating on X. Broad futures statistics for the same window put total forced closes, across both longs and shorts, in a range of $117 million to $133 million, which places the long-side losses somewhere between $80 million and $106 million. Shorts surrendered only the remainder, a small fraction of what the long side gave up.

Most of the losses landed in perpetual futures, derivative contracts with no expiry date that let traders hold leveraged positions for as long as they can cover their costs. When the market drifts against a leveraged long and its margin runs thin, the exchange closes the position automatically. A long-side share this high indicates that bets on further upside were the positions holding the least buffer, so even a modest downward drift was enough to trigger closures at scale.

The price action behind the flush was unremarkable by any measure. COINOTAG's live monitoring puts Bitcoin at $80,389, essentially flat over the past 24 hours, and Ethereum at $2,327. No trading venue collapsed, no regulatory decision landed, and no exploit, attack, institution or individual was identified behind the selling. The forced closes coincided with small price dips rather than any headline event, which points to margin stress as the working mechanism: a large cohort of leveraged longs had moved into profitable territory but left themselves little room to retreat, and a routine drift lower was all it took to clear them out.

Binance and Ethereum Took the Brunt

The venue split is as lopsided as the position split. Binance processed between 50% and 66% of total liquidation volume, a share some estimates place at $73 million or more, and the bulk of forced closures ran through Binance. Bybit and Gate also recorded noticeable activity, but at a much smaller scale. The spread of closures across several venues matters for how the event should be read: it points to a general pullback in market-wide conditions rather than an outage, malfunction or technical problem at any single platform. Concentration of that order also means a large part of the market's leveraged risk passes through one order book, so when forced closures accelerate, that single venue absorbs most of the flow.

By asset, Ethereum led the losses outright. Liquidated Ethereum positions were worth between $39 million and $54 million across the window, ahead of Bitcoin at $22 million to $32 million. Solana and a group of smaller altcoins contributed lower amounts that still registered on the tape. The single largest position closed during the flush was a long-term Ethereum long on Binance valued at an estimated $7 million, which means the biggest individual casualty came from the Ethereum book rather than the Bitcoin one. Higher aggregate losses plus the largest single closure both point the same way: leverage was stacked most heavily in Ethereum positions specifically, while Bitcoin's leveraged exposure, though painful for its holders, was comparatively lighter.

Scale needs historical context too. Flushes of this kind are common in volatile digital-asset markets, and the October 25-26 totals sit well below earlier waves that ran into the hundreds of millions or crossed $1 billion during larger market moves. This was a clearing of thin margins, not a stress event of cycle proportions, and the ranges reported by different trackers reflect different snapshots of the same 24-hour window rather than conflicting narratives.

The imbalance, more than the headline total, is what this window leaves standing. Longs exit the period lighter by $80-106 million in closed positions, and the two concentrations inside the data, Ethereum at the top of the asset table and Binance clearing half to two-thirds of the volume, describe where the market's leverage was parked when the drift came. Nothing in the liquidation record points to a repricing event: the trigger was margin pressure from small dips, not the kind of shock implied volatility measures in options markets, and totals far below the billion-dollar waves of prior moves confirm it. Our reading is that the flush trims leveraged upside bets rather than changing the market's direction; with Bitcoin essentially flat near $80,389, the book that remains is simply carrying less excess on the long side than it was a day ago.