Shorts Obliterated as Bitcoin’s Meteoric Surge to $122K Wipes Out $333M in Liquidations
Bitcoin just handed short sellers a brutal lesson in gravity—what goes down must moon.
The reckoning: A violent 24-hour pump catapulted BTC to $122,000, triggering cascading liquidations across over-leveraged bears. The damage? A cool $333 million in positions atomized—poof—like Wall Street's faith in 'transitory' inflation.
Market mechanics: When BTC's price action defies textbook technicals, exchanges auto-close leveraged positions to prevent systemic risk. Today's victims? Traders betting against the one asset that thrives on making skeptics look foolish.
The irony: This liquidation fest occurred while traditional markets wrestled with another Fed pivot narrative—because nothing screams 'hedge against monetary incompetence' like a decentralized asset punching 5x in 18 months.
Cynic's corner: Somewhere, a Goldman Sachs quant is explaining to his boss why 'digital gold' just outperformed their entire commodities desk... again.
Table showing the distribution of 24-hour liquidations across exchanges on Aug. 11, 2025, at 8:00 A.M. UTC (Source: CoinGlass)
Binance saw $120.58 million in liquidations and Bybit $103.63 million, about 67% of the 24-hour tally. OKX followed with $53.82 million, Gate with $33.11 million, and HTX with $27.74 million. The tilt toward short liquidations held across major venues: Binance showed 52.94% of value liquidated on the short side, Bybit 61.06%, OKX 53.28%, Gate 70.26%, and HTX 69.55%. Retail-heavy platforms, in particular, showed a sharper, shorter skew, matching the pattern you’d expect during a grind-up that hunts crowded entries rather than flash-crashing through thin bids.
The day’s largest liquidation was a $9.14 million BTC-USDT-SWAP order on OKX. Single tickets of that size aren’t market-moving in isolation at current liquidity, but they illustrate how quickly convexity bites once price lifts through obvious short entry clusters and liquidation bands.
If BTC holds above $121,000, the short liquidation supply should cool unless price stretches into fresh pockets higher. A swift retrace WOULD flip risk toward over-eager longs, but today’s ledger shows positioning pain sat with bears.
