Long Liquidations Hit $562M in 24 Hours

Yesterday, the market recorded the highest daily number of liquidations since June 13, 2022. Long liquidations reached $562 million in just 24 hours.

Most of these losses were in the BTC and ETH markets. However, total long liquidations in other altcoins reached as much as $144 million. The reason is the collapse of Bitcoin’s upward price structure and its sharp decline.

BTC price action

On the morning of August 19, Bitcoin collapsed from the $23,200 area and began an accelerated decline. By the end of the day, it had reached a bottom at $20,785, falling 10% on the day.

Support was provided by the lower line of the rising parallel channel, which had already been validated (green circles). An additional area of support turned out to be the horizontal level (red line), which had already acted as resistance and support. Thus, Bitcoin’s price structure retains the pattern of a rising parallel channel but has lost its median, which has served as support since the end of July.

Unfortunately, yesterday’s decline violated the uptrend structure, which had been in place since the June 18 low of $17,592. So far, Bitcoin has regularly reached higher lows (HL) and higher highs (HH). However, we see that the sharp decline has led to the generation of the first lower low (LL). If Bitcoin forms a lower high (LH) in the coming days, this will signal a resumption of the downward trend.

Largest long liquidations since June

Bitcoin’s decline has entailed red candles on all major cryptocurrency market indexes. Over the past 24 hours, Ethereum (ETH) lost almost 13%, Binance Coin (BNB) over 6%, XRP almost 10%, Cardano (ADA) 12%, and Dogecoin (DOGE) over 9%.

The steep declines caused liquidations of long positions in the cryptocurrency market to total $562 million yesterday, according to data from Coinglass. These are the largest losses that traders have suffered since June 13, when long liquidations totaled $685 million. It is worth mentioning that as a result of the high BTC daily volatility at that time, losses on short positions were equally large, amounting to as much as $468 million. Yesterday, short liquidations were relatively small, reaching $79 million.

The vast majority of yesterday’s liquidations involved the BTC and ETH markets. In 24 hours traders lost $210 million and $208 million, respectively. The remaining $144 million were long liquidations on altcoins. For example, losses on the Ethereum Classic (ETC) market amounted to almost $17 million, and on the Solana (SOL) market to just over $10 million.

Above-average long liquidations are also confirmed by data from Glassnode. Losses on futures markets monitored by this data provider totaled more than $155 million yesterday. And while these numbers are definitely lower than those reported above, yesterday’s bar of long liquidations definitely stands out above anything that has been going on over the past month.

For Be[in]Crypto’s latest Bitcoin (BTC) analysis, click here.