Steep price pullbacks wipe $90M in longs

Amid an aggressive drawdown on Thursday, leverage traders were among the hardest hit

August 17, 2023 05:03 pm

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As prices dipped lower across the sector on Thursday, derivatives traders were among the hardest-hit with $90 million in long positions wiped out in just two hours.

According to data from Coinglass, between 10:00 am and 12:00 pm ET, a sector-wide price plunge led by bitcoin (BTC) dropping from $28,393 to $27,920 kicked off a series of liquidations across centralized exchanges.

The two-hour washout is just a fraction of the $200 million lost over the last 24 hours — the highest total since June 9, when $348 million in longs were liquidated.

Leading the liquidations for the day are OKX, which liquidated $69.2 million in longs, followed by Binance, which wiped $47.3 million.

A lack of volatility in crypto large-cap assets such as bitcoin and ether (ETH) means that the liquidation stats could have been even worse. Bitcoin has been trading in a $1,500 range between $30,000 and $28,500 for the better part of a month, and a recent Kaiko report found that both BTC and ETH have recently been less volatile than oil. Traditionally, derivatives traders prefer assets with high volatility.

On-chain leverage positions may be the next area of focus if prices continue to drop. Because of DeFi protocols’ liquidation procedures, unwinding on-chain derivatives and leverage positions can lead to liquidation cascades and protocols programmatically sell user collateral.

According to DeFiLlama, $162.3 million is at risk of liquidation within a 20% price drop on the Ethereum chain alone, and $1.6 billion at risk total.

Ether is down 4.7% on the day to $1,736.

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