Bitcoin’s Friday panic selling led to $19bn of leveraged positions disappearing, but the world’s largest crypto has since bounced.
BTCUSD – Daily Chart
The price of BTC has found some buyers at the lows near $108,500, and this is the third attempt to cross that support. That has given the token some relief from selling, but further weakness cannot be ruled out in the short term.
Bitcoin’s sell-off on Friday was the largest liquidation event in the coin’s history, with all leveraged positions in close proximity being closed out. Many accounts lost up to $100k, while one saw all $19 million disappear.
In terms of market cap, Bitcoin lost $450 billion in total, moving to $3.79 trillion, but has since recovered above the $4 trillion level again.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan said the way centralized crypto exchanges, and Binance specifically, report liquidation data probably misrepresents the true scale of losses during major sell-offs.
“Because liquidations happen in bursts, this could easily be 100x under-reporting under some conditions,“ Yan wrote.
According to CoinGlass data, $16.7 billion worth of long positions and $2.46 billion in short positions were liquidated on the day. It was another dark day for cryptocurrency, and it remains to be seen if it will affect the market going forward.
Analysts have been celebrating the strong ETF inflows, with institutions investing, but volatility is never good at enticing cautious investors. The other problem is that the booming ETF market only allows access to crypto during U.S. market hours for the largest funds.
The market panic started with U.S. President Trump’s hostile social media message regarding tariffs on China. However, he backed off from that ahead of the Monday open, giving traders some respite.
However, there were fears that a second down move could be coming after a prominent account in the market sell-off returned on Monday evening in the U.S. A short position taken out ahead of Trump’s comments made $18 million on the crash. The same account opened up a $200 million short position ahead of Tuesday’s trading.
