$114 million in Bitcoin liquidations in 24 hours

Mondays are difficult at the best of times. For Bitcoin investors, however, this is a particularly tough one. The cryptocurrency wicked viciously downward, now testing support of $40,000 after trading at $43,000 less than 24 hours ago.

Personally, living in a GMT -6 timezone, I slept through most of the madness, as the above chart shows. Waking up to see those red candles on your screen is something that, for better or worse, is part of the Bitcoin rollercoaster.

Liquidations

On the bright side, it does appear that this pullback is via overleveraged longs, with cascading liquidations flushing out the overexposed. In fact, in a thirty minute period at around 5-5:30 AM EST this morning, there was circa $30 million in long liquidations of Bitcoin (somehow, there was also half a million short liquidations – that’s almost impressive). The price (yellow line in graph below) cratered from $42,200 to $41,300 in short order, as the liquidations ran rampant shown by the green bar on the below graph.

In 24 hours, there have been $114 million in liquidations across all exchanges on Bitcoin alone. If we expand out to all cryptocurrenices, that figure is at $384 million. ETH liquidations are not far off Bitcoin, at $99 million over the last 24 hours. In third place is Luna, with $13 million, while Solana is at $10 million and Dogecoin at $7.6 million.

What Does it Mean?

I don’t think this is anything to be overly concerned about. When looking on-chain, data is still very bullish, with long-time holders are accumulating. The amount of bitcoins that hasn’t moved in over a year is at its second highest ever at 12 million bitcoins. In fact, the only other time it was this high was in September 2020, just before Bitcoin went parabolic, skyrocketing from $10,000 to $61,000 in six months.

Long-term hodlers accumulating coins at a discount from short term hodlers is not something to panic about, especially when there is no significant movement in net flows to exchanges.

Bitcoin Dominance

The saying “it could always be worse” normally holds true. Unless, that is, you are an alt coin investor when there is blood in the crypto markets. Because as tends to be the case when Bitcoin is in a bad mood, alt coins are significantly worse, as the below 5-day graph for Bitcoin dominance from TradingView shows.

While alts have rebounded somewhat in the last couple of hours, many are still a lot further off than Bitcoin.

Conclusion

To wrap up, on-chain metrics remain bullish, suggesting this is just a flushing out of the leverage that we see every now and then. Hodlers have been collecting some coins at a discount from traders, who have been liquidated en masse. There is no reason to believe right now that critical support has been broken, or the market structure has changed fundamentally.

Keep hodling, zoom out and relax – it’s not going to be one of those really bad days, I don’t think.