Crypto Liquidations: Live Bitcoin Liquidation Data

Crypto liquidations are positions on leveraged derivatives that an exchange closes by force because the trader’s margin can no longer cover losses. The totals combine forced closures from the Binance, Bybit, OKX and HTX liquidation streams. They are split into long and short liquidations over 1-hour, 4-hour, 12-hour and 24-hour windows and broken down by coin, by exchange and by individual order. Bitcoin liquidations also get a history chart plotted against price.

What a liquidation is

A perpetual or futures position is opened with collateral (margin) worth a fraction of the position’s size. Leverage is the ratio between the two: $1,000 of margin controlling a $10,000 position is 10x. As price moves against the position, unrealized losses eat into the margin. Every exchange sets a maintenance margin, the minimum equity a position must keep. When equity falls to that level, the exchange’s risk engine takes over and closes the position at market.

The direction of the forced order is the opposite of the original trade:

• Long liquidation: a trader bet on a rise, price fell, and the exchange sells the position. Long liquidations add sell pressure into a falling market.
• Short liquidation: a trader bet on a fall, price rose, and the exchange buys the position back. Short liquidations add buy pressure into a rising market.

This is why liquidations can feed on themselves. A drop that liquidates longs creates market sell orders, which can push price lower and reach the next layer of long liquidation prices. Traders call this a liquidation cascade. When shorts are forced to buy into a rally, the same pattern is called a short squeeze. “Rekt” is trading slang for being wiped out by one of these forced closes.

How a liquidation price is set

The exact formula differs by exchange, contract type and margin mode. For a linear (USDT-margined) contract in isolated margin, a simplified version is:

• Long liquidation price ≈ Entry price × (1 − 1/Leverage + Maintenance margin rate)
• Short liquidation price ≈ Entry price × (1 + 1/Leverage − Maintenance margin rate)

Hypothetical example, ignoring fees and funding: a trader opens a BTC long at $80,000 with 20x leverage, and the maintenance margin rate is 0.5%. The liquidation price is about 80,000 × (1 − 0.05 + 0.005) = $76,400, a fall of roughly 4.5%. At 50x the same formula gives about $78,800, a fall of only 1.5%. Higher leverage pulls the liquidation price closer to entry, so a modest move can clear a large amount of highly leveraged positioning.

Cross margin works differently. The whole account balance backs the position, so the liquidation price depends on the account’s total equity rather than one position’s margin. If a position cannot be closed before its losses exceed its margin, exchanges cover the shortfall from an insurance fund. If that fund is not enough, some exchanges use auto-deleveraging (ADL). ADL reduces profitable opposing positions to absorb the deficit.

What the totals measure

The four summary cards show total liquidation value for the last 1, 4, 12 and 24 hours. Each card splits the total into long and short dollar amounts and their percentage shares. The two percentages always sum to 100%. They describe the mix of what was liquidated, not its size, so a 70% long share can sit on a quiet hour or a violent one.

The windows are rolling: the 24h card covers the 24 hours before the last update, not midnight to midnight UTC. Because each window contains the shorter ones, the shares can disagree. A 24h total can be long-dominated from an early sell-off while the 1h and 4h cards are short-dominated after a bounce. Comparing the windows shows whether the pressure that drove the day is still active or has reversed.

Liquidation value is notional. A $1 million long liquidation means $1 million of position size was sold by force. At 20x leverage, the margin behind it was closer to $50,000. Total liquidations therefore measure how much leveraged exposure was flushed. They do not measure aggregate trader losses.

Reading the liquidation heatmap

The heatmap is a treemap of realized liquidations. Each tile’s area is proportional to the dollar value liquidated in the selected window, and its color shows whether longs or shorts were liquidated. It can be viewed by coin or by exchange.

The coin view shows where forced closing concentrated. Bitcoin and Ethereum usually anchor it because they carry the deepest derivatives markets. In short windows, one large order in a thin, leveraged market can make an obscure ticker look dominant, so check the 12h and 24h views before reading much into a single tile.

This treemap records liquidations that have already happened. A liquidation heatmap of estimated levels instead models where liquidation prices are likely to sit above and below the current price, and a liquidation map by exchange shows those estimated clusters as a profile. Realized data shows what leverage was cleared. Level estimates suggest what leverage may still be exposed.

Exchange liquidations

The exchange table lists each venue’s total for the selected window, its long and short amounts, its share of the combined total across the four tracked exchanges, and its own long/short split. Share is relative to those four venues only, not the whole market.

Two things are worth reading beyond the ranking:

• Split differences between venues. Exchanges have different user bases, contract lists and leverage limits. Their long/short mix can diverge in the same window. A venue whose split runs against the others may have had one large position closed, or concentrated exposure in a contract the others list less heavily.
• Small totals give extreme percentages. An exchange with a small dollar total can show a 95/5 split from a handful of orders. Weight the split by the dollar amount next to it.

Largest liquidation orders and the live feed

The largest liquidation orders list ranks the ten biggest single orders of the last 24 hours by pair, side, dollar value and UTC time. It ranks orders, not traders. A big position can be liquidated in several pieces, so two or three entries for the same pair and side within a minute or two may belong to one account or one price level being hit. Clusters at the same timestamp across BTC and ETH usually mark a market-wide move rather than isolated accounts.

The live liquidations feed streams individual forced orders as they arrive, with time, coin, side, execution price and dollar value. Most rows are small. The feed is most useful during fast moves, when the pace and size of rows show whether a cascade is building. The price shown is the fill of the liquidation order, not the trader’s entry price or the liquidation trigger price. Once the trigger is hit, the exchange closes the position with a market order that fills at whatever liquidity is available, so in a fast or thin market the fill can land beyond the trigger.

BTC liquidation history vs. price

The BTC liquidation history chart plots long and short liquidation bars against the Bitcoin price line at 1h, 4h, 12h or 1d intervals. Short intervals show individual flush events. Longer intervals show which side has been losing over days.

Tall long bars line up with sharp price drops, and tall short bars with sharp rallies. What the chart adds is proportion. A large price move with modest bars suggests spot or unleveraged flows drove it. A small move with very tall bars suggests crowded, fragile positioning. After a heavy one-sided flush, part of the leverage that powered the move is gone, which can change how the market reacts to the next move.

Liquidations by asset

The asset table ranks coins by liquidation value, with long and short amounts across the 1h, 4h and 24h windows next to price and 24h change. A coin that is long-heavy over 24h but short-heavy over the last hour has likely turned around since the main liquidation event.

Not every row is a crypto asset. The tracked exchanges list perpetual contracts on equity tickers such as NVDA, leveraged ETF tickers such as SOXL and SOXS, and gold (XAU), and these count toward the totals. A spike in crypto liquidations can therefore partly come from a move in a stock or commodity contract, which the asset table makes visible.

What drives liquidation volume

Liquidation totals depend less on how far price moves than on how much leverage is sitting in the path of the move. The main inputs:

• Open interest. More open positions mean more potential liquidations. Rising open interest during a trend means fresh leverage is being added.
• Leverage and its distribution. Positions at high leverage have liquidation prices close to entry. Many of them opened near the same price create dense clusters that one move can clear.
• Positioning skew. When one side dominates, a move against it has more fuel. Funding rates and the long/short ratio show which side is crowded and how much it pays to stay in.
• Volatility and liquidity. Thin order books let forced market orders move price further, which is why weekends, overnight sessions and small-cap tokens can produce outsized liquidations.
• Catalysts. Macro data releases, regulatory news, exchange incidents and large spot flows can all trigger the first move that starts a chain.

Limits of the data

• Coverage. Figures come from four exchanges’ liquidation streams. Other centralized venues and on-chain perpetual exchanges are not included, so the totals understate market-wide liquidations.
• Stream reporting. Exchanges publish liquidations through their own feeds, with their own rules. Some public streams throttle reporting. Binance, for example, documents that its liquidation stream pushes at most the latest liquidation per symbol in each one-second snapshot. Totals built from such feeds are a floor rather than a full count, and they are not directly comparable across venues.
• Notional, not loss. Values are position size at execution. They do not net out margin, fees or partial recoveries, and they say nothing about how many traders were affected.
• Timing. The live feed streams continuously, while cards and tables refresh every five minutes and can trail the feed during a fast move. All times are UTC.
• No predictive signal on its own. Realized liquidations describe leverage already cleared. A high long share means longs were forced out in that window. After such a flush, less leveraged long exposure remains, but the share alone does not show whether selling will continue. Judging the next move needs open interest, funding and estimated liquidation levels alongside it.