Extreme Leverage Drove $500 Million Worth of BTC Liquidations in an Hour
The Bitcoin market emphatically rejected the record-breaking $60,000 mark on March 15, with excessive leverage driving a record $500 million worth of long liquidations in just an hour.
Jan & Yann, Founders of Glassnode, emphasized a new record hourly Bitcoin for liquidations, noting that more than half open futures contracts prior to the margin calls were leveraged by at least 20 times.
However, data from Bybt suggests $800 million worth of liquidations were processed over just 15 minutes.
According to data from crypto market aggregator, Datamish, the past 24 hours saw 292 positions liquidated for $94.5 million on derivatives exchange, BitMEX. On Bitfinex, 488 positions were liquidated for approximately $100 million over the same period of time.
The second largest single-day liquidation seen on this Feb. 22, when BTC fell from its then all-time high of $58,300 to around $47,000. As reported by Cointelegraph, $5.9 billion worth of futures contracts were liquidated during the huge crash.
Since its March 14 peak of $61,000, Bitcoin has corrected by 12.3% to $53,500 during Asian trading on Tuesday, March 16. BTC has since produced a slight recovery, last changing hands for $54,600 as of this writing.
This latest correction is the third major retracement of the current cryptocurrency bull run.