Data shows that bullish bets regarding Bitcoin have seen a massive amount of liquidation as the asset’s price has fallen below the $70,000 mark.
Bitcoin falls below $70,000 for the first time since April
Following the bearish tone set in the second half of May, Bitcoin has opened June with another decline as the price fell below $70,000 for the first time since April 7.
Below is a chart showing what the latest bearish action looked like for the cryptocurrency.
Over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin has fallen by almost 5% and has reached the $69,400 mark. Interestingly, Ethereum, the second largest token by market capitalization, has survived while the original digital asset has taken this hit, dropping just 0.7% within this window. Even many altcoins have seen smaller losses than BTC.
The reason behind Bitcoin’s disproportionate decline may lie in the fact that its bearish action was at least partially driven by a rare selling by Strategy, the asset’s largest holder. Meanwhile, Bitmine, the strategy equivalent to Ethereum, has announced instead, another takeover.
Since BTC’s decline over the past day has been significant, it has caught a significant number of traders in the derivatives market by surprise.
BTC-related liquidations have exceeded $445 million
According to data from MintGlassThere has been a notable number of liquidations involving Bitcoin on centralized exchanges over the past 24 hours. ‘Liquidation’ here refers to the forceful closing that an open contract undergoes after it has incurred a certain percentage of losses (as defined by the specific platform).
As shown in the table below, total liquidations associated with the digital asset sector have surpassed the $800 million mark.
Of this, more than $689 million in contracts concerned long positions. In percentage terms, this figure corresponds to more than 85%. This dominance of bullish liquidations obviously makes sense in the context of the decline the market has faced over the past day.
Because Bitcoin was hit particularly hard during this period, it was by far the largest contributor to the liquidations.
The heatmap above shows that a total of $445 million worth of BTC contracts were liquidated in the last 24 hours. The proportion of long liquidations was significantly higher than the average for the broader sector, with more than 95% of contracts being bullish bets.
Although Ethereum’s price action has been relatively flat, it still ended up with $91 million in liquidations, the second highest after Bitcoin.