Volatility tied to the Federal Reserve’s rate decision knocked out positions for nearly 90,000 traders, with losses distributed almost evenly between bullish and bearish bets.
On the surface, major cryptocurrencies are little changed over the past 24 hours. Beneath that calm, however, were sharp, two-way price swings around the Fed meeting that flushed out leveraged futures positions and led to heavy liquidations.
According to CoinGlass, roughly $286 million in positions were liquidated across 87,294 traders during the period. Long positions made up $186 million of the total, while shorts accounted for $100 million—evidence of a market that moved forcefully in both directions before ending near where it began.
Bitcoin liquidations totaled about $57 million, split nearly evenly between $28 million in longs and $29 million in shorts. Prices moved within a relatively narrow band between $63,247 and $64,660, yet that roughly 2% range was enough to trigger liquidations on both sides.
The largest single liquidation was a $2.9 million bitcoin position on Binance.
Ether recorded the highest total liquidations at around $58 million, with losses skewed toward long positions, as prices fluctuated between $1,850 and $1,920. At the time of writing, bitcoin hovered near $63,900 and ether around $1,900, both largely unchanged over the day.
Most of the liquidations occurred during Wednesday’s Fed rate announcement, when erratic price action wiped out about $188 million in positions. Long trades alone accounted for $130 million of that figure.
A notable share of the losses also came from equity-linked perpetual futures traded on crypto exchanges. Around $19 million in SanDisk positions were liquidated, along with $10 million in Micron, $7 million in SK Hynix, and $7 million in SOXL, a leveraged semiconductor ETF. These products track stocks and funds but trade on crypto venues with similar leverage.
The vast majority of these liquidations were long positions. Micron losses were heavily skewed, roughly $9 million in longs versus $1 million in shorts, while SanDisk showed a two-to-one imbalance. Traders had been using crypto derivatives to bet on continued strength in the AI memory sector but were caught off guard by a sharp downturn in chip stocks.
The timing proved unfavorable. SK Hynix dropped 17% on Wednesday despite reporting a 557% jump in profit that fell short of expectations. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Kospi index has declined more than 40% from its June peak.
This marks the second disruption this week involving equity perpetuals on crypto platforms. Earlier, a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue sent Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19%, triggering $60 million in liquidations—losses the exchange has since agreed to reimburse.
