The total liquidations between Jan. 14 and Jan. 15 reached $201.87 million, with a skewed distribution favoring short positions. Data from CoinGlass showed that 74,152 traders were liquidated during this period, showing that yesterday’s price spike caught many traders off guard.
Liquidation data shows that shorts were disproportionally affected, making up about 64.89% of all liquidations. The significant percentage suggests that many traders were positioned for a price decline but were caught in a rebound again.
The largest exchanges by liquidation volume were Binance ($83.49 million), OKX ($43.63 million), and Bybit ($38.54 million), with Binance alone accounting for 41.36% of all liquidations. While Binance dominated liquidations, smaller exchanges like Gate.io and HTX show significantly higher percentages of short liquidations (68.89% and 74.8%, respectively) than larger ones.
This suggests that traders on smaller exchanges may have taken more aggressive short positions or had less efficient risk management practices.
Ripple’s XRP saw a 14.34% increase, leading to $12.61 million in short liquidations over 24 hours. Compared to BTC and ETH, the outsized move suggests that altcoin traders were particularly poorly positioned for upward price movement.
The presence of numerous smaller cryptocurrencies in the liquidation heat map, including SOL, DOGE, and various DeFi tokens, indicates that the leverage wipeout was market-wide rather than isolated to major assets. Nonetheless, BTC dominated the liquidations with $57.94 million, followed by ETH at $37.54 million.
The temporal distribution of liquidations shows acceleration, with the 4-hour period recording $21.26 million in liquidations compared to $6.69 million over the 1-hour period. This progressive increase suggests that initial liquidations may have triggered a chain reaction, forcing more positions to close as prices continued to move against short traders.
The high ratio of short to long liquidations across different timeframes means this wasn’t a brief spike but a sustained market movement that continuously pressured bearish positions.
A single hefty $2.98 million ETHUSDT liquidation on Binance amid thousands of smaller liquidations shows the varying scales of market participants affected by this move. The variance suggests that both retail and larger, more sophisticated institutional or professional traders were caught off guard by the price spike — indicating a broader misreading of market conditions across different market participants.
Over 74,000 traders were liquidated in this period while the price moves were relatively modest (2.51% for BTC, 1.84% for ETH), suggesting that the market was heavily leveraged. This level of risk makes the market particularly susceptible to cascade effects where initial price movements can trigger chain reactions of liquidations.
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Over 74,000 positions liquidated after modest market recovery, indicating high leverage
