$300M in Longs Liquidated in 1 Hour: Bitcoin Crashes, Ethereum Rejected at $5K

The entire cryptocurrency market headed straight south on Sunday evening, led by a massive price drop from the largest of the bunch.

Bitcoin’s price had calmed at around $115,000 all day with little to no moves in either direction, but suddenly plunged to its lowest price level since July 10.

Recall that the primary cryptocurrency skyrocketed on Friday after Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s somewhat optimistic speech about upcoming interest rate cuts. The asset went from under $112,000, which was a local low at the time, to over $117,000 within an hour or so.

However, that relief rally was short-lived, and BTC quickly retraced to around $115,000, where it spent most of the weekend. Less than an hour ago, though, the bears unexpectedly reemerged by pushing BTC to a six-week low of $110,600 (on most exchanges).

Bitcoin recovered two grand since then, but still trades below $113,000. It took most altcoins south with it, including ETH, which was flying high.

In fact, the second-largest cryptocurrency just painted a new all-time high of almost $5,000. As the community was anticipating a breakthrough above that milestone, though, ETH plummeted to nearly $4,700 before recovering to around $4,800 as of press time.

Most altcoins charted similar volatile price moves over the past hour, which has harmed over-leveraged traders. Data from CoinGlass shows that the hourly liquidations have shot up to well over $300 million, with longs responsible for roughly 90% of the entire amount.

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The wrecked positions on a daily scale are almost double that size, with over 130,000 traders liquidated. The single-largest wrecked position took place on OKX and was worth north of $12 million.