Data shows the cryptocurrency derivatives market has suffered a high amount of liquidations in the past day after the crash the altcoins have seen.
Altcoin Longs Witness Squeeze, Ethereum Leads In Liquidations
The past day has been a volatile time for the cryptocurrency market, with the majority of the altcoins suffering from drops of more than 5%. As is generally the case, this sector-wide volatility has resulted in chaos over at the derivatives side.
According to data from CoinGlass, the derivatives market has observed contracts worth almost $429 million finding liquidation over the last 24 hours.
The data for the liquidation flush that has occurred over the past day | Source: CoinGlass
A contract is said to be “liquidated” when the platform with which it’s open has to forcibly close it up after accumulating losses of a certain degree (the exact figure may differ between exchanges).
As is visible in the above table, long contract holders saw the vast majority of such forceful closures during the past day. More specifically, around $367 million of the liquidations, equivalent to more than 85% of the total, involved these traders betting on a bullish outcome for the market.
The reason behind such lopsided liquidations naturally lies in the fact that the cryptocurrencies as a whole have seen a steep downwards trajectory in the period.
Below is a heatmap that shows how the individual assets have contributed towards this latest derivatives flush.
The distribution of the liquidations by symbol | Source: CoinGlass
Unlike what’s usually the case during these violent liquidation events, Bitcoin (BTC) isn’t leading the charts in this metric. Instead, Ethereum (ETH), the second largest cryptocurrency based on market cap, is at the top with around $92 million liquidations.
This could be down to the fact that Bitcoin has moved more or less sideways in this period, while Ethereum has witnessed a drop of over 3%. Interestingly, behind these two top coins are the memecoins Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), with liquidations amounting to $60 million and $23 million, respectively.
These altcoins have seen the sharpest plunges among the top cryptocurrencies at around 11% each. This, combined with the fact that memecoins get more speculative activity in general, could explain why DOGE and SHIB are ahead of coins not called ETH or BTC.
Even then, the difference between Dogecoin and Bitcoin is currently just $10 million, which is impressive considering the market cap difference between the two assets.
A mass liquidation event like this latest one is popularly known as a “squeeze.” During these events, liquidations can cascade together like a waterfall, causing even higher volatility in the market. As the longs took an overwhelming majority of the latest liquidations, the event would be called a “long squeeze.”
Squeezes aren’t an uncommon event in the cryptocurrency market, due to the generally high volatility of the various coins, but an altcoin-dominated squeeze of a scale like this one is certainly not something that occurs on the regular.
ETH Price
Following this latest plunge, Ethereum, the largest among the altcoins, has dropped to the $3,400 level.
Looks like the price of the coin has gone down recently | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView
