1.2 million people suffer a loss of $415 million: The imbalance between longs and shorts in the 24-hour liquidation wave

2026-01-09 02:31:38

In the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency market experienced a massive wave of liquidations. According to Coinglass data, the total liquidation amount across the entire network reached $415 million, including $335 million in long positions and $79.291 million in short positions. More strikingly, a total of 120,572 traders were liquidated during this period, with the largest single liquidation occurring on the Hyperliquid BTC-USD trading pair, valued at $2.9993 million.

Imbalanced Characteristics of Liquidation Data

From the liquidation structure, long positions accounted for as much as 80.9%, while short positions only made up 19.1%. This stark imbalance reflects overly concentrated bullish sentiment among market participants.

Liquidation Type	Amount	Proportion	Feature
Long Liquidation	$335 million	80.9%	Bullish traders hit hard
Short Liquidation	$79.291 million	19.1%	Bearish traders under less pressure
Total	$415 million	100%	Market risk released

As major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum also show similar characteristics in their liquidation data:

Coin	Long Liquidation	Short Liquidation	Long/Short Ratio
BTC	$104 million	$23.5871 million	4.4:1
ETH	$81.8329 million	$16.0827 million	5.1:1

Why Are Long Liquidations Far Outnumbering Shorts?

Several reasons underlie this imbalance:

Market bullish sentiment dominates: Recently, the overall crypto market has been trending upward, attracting many retail traders to open long positions.
Leverage concentrated on the bullish side: Long traders are more easily driven by emotions to increase leverage.
Extreme volatility triggers stop-losses: Rapid market declines cause concentrated liquidations of long positions.
More cautious risk management among shorts: Short sellers tend to be more risk-sensitive, with lower leverage multiples.

The Other Side of Risk Release

120,572 traders were liquidated within 24 hours, reflecting that market participants still do not sufficiently appreciate the risks of leveraged trading. The largest single liquidation of $2.9993 million indicates that some traders are still exposed to risk levels beyond their capacity.

Such extreme cases typically occur in:

High-leverage trading (above 5x)
Lack of stop-loss setups
Retail traders chasing high prices
Insufficient expectations of market volatility

Summary

The core feature of this wave of liquidations is a severe imbalance between longs and shorts, indicating overly concentrated bullish sentiment. While liquidations are part of market risk release, the scale of over 120K liquidated traders reminds us that participants in the crypto market need to exercise greater caution with leverage. The phenomenon of over 80% of liquidations being longs warrants attention; when market consensus becomes too high, it often signals the greatest risk accumulation. Future observations should focus on whether the market can stabilize at high levels and whether a new round of risk release will be triggered.

BTC-0,68%

ETH-1,17%

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