Bitcoin’s BTC$65,791.51 Monday’s price drop wiped out a large leveraged bullish bet.
According to data source Coinglass, $61.5 million worth of trades were terminated by cryptocurrency exchange HTX, making it the largest single liquidation in the past 24 hours.
The so-called liquidation came as Bitcoin fell from Saturday’s high of $68,600 to $64,400, erasing the weekend’s gains in a matter of hours. CoinDesk has reached out to HTX for comment.
The outsized hit was large enough to suggest a concentration of whale or fund positions rather than retail margin calls, and landed amid a broader sweep with liquidations totaling $467.64 million among 137,422 traders, Coinglass said. Of this, long positions accounted for $434 million, or about 93% of the total, indicating that the market was still in an upward position this week and was flushed out as the bids disappeared.
Bitcoin futures alone had $213.62 million in forced closures, followed by Ether (ETH) with $113.89 million and Solana (SOL) with $19.89 million. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token added another $10.72 million. This is a remarkable number for an asset that doesn’t rank in the top five of regular liquidation leaderboards.
fear rules
With this decline, Alternative.me’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index returned to 5 out of 100. The index is classified as “extreme fear” and has matched only three times since it was launched in 2018: in August 2019, June 2022, and earlier this month when Bitcoin fell to $60,000.
Glassnode data reinforces stress. The company announced on Monday that the seven-day moving average of net realized losses for recent Bitcoin buyers remains near $500 million per day, meaning short-term holders continue to capitulate even after the initial February flush.
“Although the intensity has subsided, the broader regime still shows the market is under pressure, and foundation-stage participants continue to capitulate,” Glasnord said.
Bitcoin is currently 48% below its October all-time high of $126,000 and 5.5% below its 2021 bull market peak of $69,000. This level once felt like a ceiling, but now it looks like a floor that continues to be tested. Monday’s remnants have deleveraged, but the pattern remains. Traders reload their longs on every pullback and the market continues to punish them for it.
