Via bitpanda.com
63,222 crypto traders liquidated in past 24 hours as leverage continues to bite
The latest round of forced closures totaled roughly $195 million, a figure that looks almost quaint compared to the industry's recent history of billion-dollar wipeouts.
More than 63,000 crypto traders had their positions forcibly closed over the past 24 hours, a number that sounds alarming until you realize it’s basically a Tuesday in the derivatives market.
CoinGlass data pegged the tally at 61,784 liquidated traders as of August 19, with total value wiped out reaching approximately $195.59 million. Long positions accounted for $110.14 million of that damage, while shorts contributed $85.46 million.
Inside the numbers
The liquidations spanned major exchanges including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, and Hyperliquid. That last platform hosted the single largest individual liquidation order, a $23.35 million position.
No specific macro catalyst or breaking news event has been tied to this particular batch of liquidations. These weren’t panic-driven, flash-crash liquidations triggered by a regulatory bombshell or a geopolitical shock.
The near-even split between longs and shorts, $110 million versus $85 million, suggests the market was range-bound enough to catch overleveraged traders on both sides.
A quiet day by recent standards
In 2025, the crypto derivatives market recorded approximately $150 billion in forced liquidations across the full year, working out to a daily average somewhere between $400 million and $500 million. By that benchmark, a $195 million day is well below the mean.
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In October 2025, a geopolitical shock triggered more than $19 billion in liquidations across the industry, impacting roughly 1.6 million traders. That remains the single largest liquidation event on record.
A February 2026 episode swept through over 335,000 traders and totaled approximately $2.2 billion in forced closures.
What the pattern tells traders
Leverage remains extraordinarily accessible. Some platforms still offer 100x or higher multipliers on perpetual futures contracts, meaning a 1% adverse price move can vaporize an entire position. At 50x leverage, a mere 2% price swing in the wrong direction triggers a full liquidation.
The $150 billion in 2025 liquidations, spread across millions of individual positions, represents a massive, continuous transfer of capital from overleveraged speculators to more conservative market participants and to the exchanges themselves, which collect liquidation fees.
The roughly even 56/44 long-to-short liquidation ratio seen here suggests a choppy, indecisive market rather than a strong directional move that caught consensus positioning off guard.