Ethereum Plunge Triggers $449M Liquidation Bloodbath – Here’s What Happened

Crypto markets got steamrolled as Ethereum nosedived nearly 6% overnight.

Liquidation carnage spreads

Leveraged traders got wrecked as ETH's drop forced $449 million in liquidations—proof that even 'smart money' can't time this market. Exchanges raked in fees while portfolios burned.

Volatility strikes again

The flash dip shows crypto's brutal efficiency at separating overconfident traders from their capital. As one analyst quipped: 'Traders treat stop-losses like New Year's resolutions—abandoned by January 2nd.'

Ethereum was at the center of this move, recording $179 million in forced closures, the largest among all assets. Bitcoin followed with $102.34 million.

The concentration of liquidations in ETH reflects its sharper price drop: Ethereum fell nearly 6% over the period, closing near $4,073, while Bitcoin lost about 2.78% to $112,604. The scale of ETH’s decline relative to BTC made Leveraged longs particularly vulnerable, which explains why ETH outweighed BTC despite Bitcoin’s larger market size.

The hourly breakdown shows that most of the wipeouts came in clusters, with $128.49 million liquidated in just 12 hours. The single largest liquidation order, valued at $9.7 million, occurred on Binance in the BTCUSDT pair.

Across exchanges, liquidation ratios also showed how skewed traders were. On HTX and CoinEx, more than 86% of liquidations came from longs, while Bitfinex recorded an extreme 99.9% on the long side.

Even on exchanges with more balanced activity, such as OKX and Hyperliquid, liquidations leaned heavily against longs. This pattern tells us that the liquidation cascade was not the result of a broad two-way flush but rather a concentrated squeeze on long positions.