$146M in long positions liquidated from crypto market in 24 hours

The crypto derivatives market just handed leveraged bulls an expensive lesson. Roughly $146M in long positions were forcibly closed across the market in a single 24-hour window, with Bitcoin and Ethereum accounting for the lion’s share of the damage.

The liquidations hit hardest on perpetual futures contracts, the instrument of choice for traders looking to amplify their bets on rising prices.

Where the pain concentrated

Binance, Bybit, and OKX bore the brunt of the liquidation activity on the centralized exchange side. Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetuals platform that has carved out a growing share of derivatives volume, also saw significant forced closures.

The $146M figure, while striking, likely understates the actual total. Aggregator platforms like CoinGlass are known to produce conservative estimates because not every exchange reports complete liquidation data. Live trackers monitoring the broader picture suggested total liquidations, including both longs and shorts, may have ranged between $200M and $300M during the same period.

BTC and ETH dominated the liquidation leaderboard, which makes sense given that these two assets attract the deepest pools of leveraged trading activity.

A recurring pattern in 2026

This wasn’t an isolated event. The crypto market has experienced multiple waves of forced liquidations throughout 2026, with hundreds of millions in long positions wiped out during prior episodes tied to price swings in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Perpetual futures contracts are especially susceptible to this dynamic because they have no expiration date, meaning positions can stay open indefinitely as long as the trader maintains sufficient margin. A trader using 10x leverage on a long position only needs a 10% price decline to lose their entire margin. At 20x leverage, that threshold drops to 5%. At 50x, which some platforms still offer, a mere 2% move in the wrong direction is enough to get wiped out entirely.

The cascade mechanics

When a cluster of long positions gets liquidated, the exchange effectively market-sells those positions to close them. That wave of selling pressure pushes prices lower, which in turn liquidates the next tier of leveraged longs, whose forced closures push prices even lower still.

Decentralized platforms like Hyperliquid add another dimension to this dynamic. On-chain liquidations are transparent and visible to everyone in real time, meaning other traders can see the cascade forming and may choose to front-run it by selling ahead of the forced closures.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.