Crypto Liquidations

A crypto liquidation is the forced closure of a leveraged position by the exchange that carries it. Traders on perpetual futures post margin as collateral and borrow the rest of their exposure; when the market moves against them far enough that their equity falls below the maintenance margin, the venue closes the position at market rather than waiting for more collateral to arrive.

The trader does not choose the exit — the exchange's risk engine does. Every forced closure is published as a liquidation, and the totals on this page add that flow up across venues over the last 1h, 4h, 12h and 24h. Because higher leverage leaves a thinner buffer, a 100x position can be wiped out by a move a 2x position barely registers.

A long liquidation is a leveraged buy closed out as the price falls; a short liquidation is a leveraged sell closed out as the price rises. Long liquidations therefore pile up in sell-offs and short liquidations in rallies, so the split between the two is a direct read on which side of the market just got caught.

A lopsided short figure is the fingerprint of a short squeeze: rising prices force shorts to buy back, those buys push the price higher, and the next tier of shorts is closed in turn. The long/short ratio in the tables above shows how the liquidated value divides between the two sides over the window you select.

Totals, the coin table and the exchange breakdown refresh about once a minute, and the historical chart every few minutes. The chart buckets longs and shorts by 4H, 12H, 1D or 1W and overlays the BTC price, so liquidation spikes can be lined up against price action.

Liquidations are aggregated across the major derivatives venues CoinStats tracks, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate, HTX, Hyperliquid, CoinEx and Bitfinex. Coverage varies by exchange, since not every venue publishes a public liquidation feed at the same level of detail.

It shows how the liquidated value over the selected window splits between longs and shorts — the two percentages always add up to 100%. A long share above 50% means more longs were wiped out than shorts; below 50% means shorts took the larger hit.

Every aggregator only sees what the exchange feeds publish, and exchanges differ in how much they expose — some stream each individual order while others push a single aggregated message per second. The figures here reflect the volume observed across the venues CoinStats covers, so trends and relative spikes stay comparable even when absolute totals differ elsewhere.

Forced closures are market orders, and market orders move price. When one wave of liquidations pushes the price into the next cluster of maintenance-margin levels, those positions are closed too, and the result is a liquidation cascade — a self-reinforcing loop that runs until leverage thins out or resting bids absorb the flow.

Cascades need fuel, and that fuel is open interest. When open interest climbs while funding rates sit at an extreme, a large pool of one-sided leverage is resting on thin margin. Add a shallow order book and an ordinary pullback becomes a flash crash — the pattern behind almost every multi-billion-dollar liquidation day on record.

Bitcoin liquidations set the tempo for the rest of the market. Bitcoin carries the deepest perpetual order books, so a cascade there drags correlated assets with it, and altcoins — with thinner liquidity and higher average leverage — routinely fall further on the same trigger.

The effect is usually sharp and short-lived. Once the leveraged supply has been cleared, price often recovers part of the move, which is why liquidation spikes so frequently mark local extremes rather than the start of a trend. Watching Ethereum and BTC dominance alongside the totals here shows whether a flush is broad or concentrated.

Start with the window cards, then the chart. Lining the long and short bars up against the BTC price overlay turns the series into a working liquidation heatmap: tall bars on a single candle are cascades, steady low bars are ordinary attrition. Switch the interval to zoom from intraday flushes out to weekly structure.

Then break the same window down. The coin table ranks where the damage landed, and the exchange table shows the venue split — exchange liquidations concentrated on Binance, OKX or Bybit usually reflect where the leverage was booked rather than where the move began. Coverage differs by venue, so see our crypto exchanges pages for the full list and compare relative spikes rather than absolute totals across sites.