The past 24 hours saw $4 billion worth of both short and long positions liquidated following Tesla's decision to halt BTC payments.
Today is a bloody day in the cryptocurrency market. The current downturn was propelled by Tesla’s most recent announcement, revealing that the company will no longer be accepting bitcoin as payment for its electric vehicles.
As CryptoPotato reported earlier today, the electric vehicle manufacturer announced that they would no longer accept BTC for its products.
Elon Musk also retweeted the decision, which quoted environmental issues related to the energy-intensive Bitcoin mining process.
This had many in the community scratching their head as to what changed Musk’s mind after he had previously agreed with Jack Dorsey that bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy.
In any case, the damage is done, and the cryptocurrency market is bleeding in response. The total capitalization lost almost $400 billion (at the time of this writing) within the last 24 hours.
Moreover, around $4 billion worth of both long and short positions were liquidated in the same period, according to data from Bybt.
Not surprisingly, bitcoin markets account for the majority of the liquidations, standing at just over $2 billion at press time, followed by ETH and Filecoin.
Liquidations by Symbol. Source: Bybt
Almost 90% of the liquidations were of long positions where Huobi and Bybit occupy the first two spots in terms of volume, followed by Binance and OKEx.
Georgi Georgiev is CryptoPotato's editor-in-chief and seasoned writer with over four years of experience writing about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Georgi's passion for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies bloomed in late 2016 and he hasn't looked back since. Crypto’s technological and economic implications are what interest him most, and he has one eye turned to the market whenever he’s not sleeping. Contact George: LinkedIn
