Cryptocurrency traders suffered over $100 million of losses from liquidations during Monday’s market rout as digital asset prices tumbled amid an escalating war in the Middle East.
Some $105 million of long positions – traders who bet that prices would rise – were wiped out as of the U.S. afternoon, CoinGlass data shows. This was the largest amount of long liquidations in a day since Sept. 11.
The liquidations happened as crypto prices tumbled as the fight between Israel and Hamas and rising turmoil in the region jolted investors, weighing on risk assets. The largest digital asset, bitcoin (BTC), was down over 2% before climbing back to $27,600. At one point, ether (ETH) slid almost 5% and large-cap cryptocurrencies solana (SOL), Polygon’s native token (MATIC) and Polkadot’s (DOT) endured 6% to 7% declines. They rebounded some later.
Liquidations occur when an exchange closes a leveraged trading position due to a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial money down, or “margin,” because the trader fails to meet the margin requirements or doesn’t have enough funds to keep the position open.
ETH derivatives traders took the brunt of the losses, as falling prices spurred $32.78 million of longs liquidated over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass. The largest single liquidation order was a $4.5 million ETH-BUSD long on crypto exchange Binance.