Over $1.19 billion in crypto leveraged positions were liquidated within 24 hours

The crypto market just got smoked again, but everyone saw it coming… just perhaps not this fast.

Over the past 24 hours, exchanges have confirmed roughly $1.20 billion in forced liquidations after a sudden correction crushed over-leveraged traders.

Bitcoin took the biggest hit, losing $432.35 million worth of long positions before Ethereum followed with $269.51 million. Solana bled $89.64 million, while a pool of other tokens recorded $101.84 million in liquidations, according to data from Coinglass.

Mid-sized coins didn’t get a pass either, as XRP lost $27.74 million, and HYPE saw $26.71 million vanish. In total, 301,101 traders were caught in the storm, with the single largest wipeout (a $20.42 million liquidation) taking place on the ETH-USD pair at Hyperliquid.

Traders face the biggest forced sell-off in crypto history

Friday, October 10, will go down as one of the worst days for crypto traders yet. The sell-off triggered the largest liquidation event ever recorded, with $19 billion in leveraged bets force-closed.

Bitcoin futures open interest dropped by over $10 billion that day, one of the largest one-day declines ever seen, with Glassnode comparing it to the May 2021 crash and the FTX collapse in 2022, both of which reset market leverage in similar ways.

Analysts said this carnage stemmed from overconfidence, bullish sentiment that overheated after a shaky week. Longs worth $916.76 million were erased, while shorts worth $268.40 million got caught in the crossfire.

Top assets like Bitcoin, Ether, BNB, XRP, and SOL fell between 15% and 20%, while lesser-known coins collapsed as much as 80%. Fear spread across Crypto Twitter, and chaos followed.

Veteran Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer jumped in to calm the frenzy, saying people were confusing liquidations with actual losses.

“I don’t know who needs to hear this,” Udi wrote on X, “but in liquidations doesn’t mean people lost. It means that worth of leveraged positions were forced-closed.” He broke it down simply: “You have $100 in your account and opened a $2,000 long. Your $2,000 position got liquidated, but you only lost $100. You guys seem to literally think people lost. It’s not even close.”

Experts explain how leverage distorted the real scale of losses

Patrick Heusser, head of lending and TradFi at Sentora, which was formerly IntoTheBlock, explained that the $19 billion figure wasn’t real money burned; it was notional exposure that got wiped out.

“When a long is liquidated,” Patrick said, “the trader typically loses their posted margin; the rest of that notional was borrowed exposure. With average leverage sitting around 10x, the actual capital lost during the crash was between $1 billion and several billion, not the full $19 billion making headlines. Open interest collapsing tells you leverage came out of the system. It doesn’t mean an equal pile of cash evaporated.”

Meanwhile, while Bitcoin burned, Cryptopolitan reported that gold quietly made history, advancing for the ninth straight week, something that’s happened only five times in fifty years, and crossing $30 trillion market cap for the first time ever.

From October 1975 to October 2025, there have been 2,601 rolling nine-week periods, and only 0.19% of them showed such a streak. Historical data shows what happened in the months that followed those rare rallies; one month, three months, six months, twelve months, and even two years later.

Still, though, the traditional 60/40 portfolio has been under attack for years, and the recent hot trades in precious metals and cryptocurrencies are leading it to lose a little more of its prominence. Multiple strategists and investors are pivoting toward a 60/20/20 market portfolio: with the 60% in stocks unchanged, but fixed income losing half of its former hold over investor money, and 20% carved out for alternatives like gold and Bitcoin

Bitcoin reached a record high of $126,000 on October 6 and has seen a flood of new money this past month, with iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) taking in close to $1 billion in a single day, and over $4 billion at the mid-month October mark.

“Right now, capital is clearly favoring gold due to its momentum and reduced volatility profile,” Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat, told Yahoo Finance. “There are also structural buyers in central banks, which provides a quasi-backstop to the trade.”

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