Crypto liquidations

01 The set

What is on this board

Every bubble is a coin with futures or perpetual contracts, and its size is how many dollars of positions on it were force-closed over the window you picked — the last hour, four hours or day. The hundred drawn are the ones with the most over the last 24 hours, and they stay the same hundred when you switch to a shorter window, so a bubble shrinking on the 1-hour view means the selling stopped, not that the coin left the board.

Colour is which side was wiped out, not how the price moved. Red means mostly longs were liquidated — traders betting on a rise, closed out as the price fell through their margin. Green means mostly shorts, closed out as it rose. Grey means the two were about even. Red here and red on the market board usually agree, because longs are liquidated on falls, but they are different numbers and they part ways on a day that whipsaws.

The figures likely undercount, and most in the minutes that matter. They are CoinMarketCap's sum across the exchanges it has a liquidation feed for. Exchanges throttle the feeds totals like this are usually built from — Binance, the largest, publishes at most one liquidation per contract per second — so when a cascade closes hundreds of positions in a second, many of them never reach a public total. Read a spike here as a lower bound of what happened, not the full count.

Cryptocurrencies only. Exchanges also list perpetual contracts on stocks, indices, oil, silver and gold, and CoinMarketCap counts their liquidations alongside the coins. They are left off this board and out of its totals, so a total that includes them will run higher than the one here. Gold-backed tokens such as PAX Gold are cryptocurrencies and stay.

03 Background

What a liquidation is, and why they come in waves

A liquidation is a leveraged position closed by the exchange, not by the trader. Borrow to bet ten times your money on a price going up, and a fall of about a tenth leaves your deposit covering nothing. Before it can go negative the exchange sells the position for you. That sale is the liquidation, and its size is the size of the whole position, not of the deposit that was lost.

They cascade because each one is a market order. A forced sale pushes the price down a little, which reaches the next trader's liquidation price, whose forced sale pushes it a little further. Leverage clusters at round numbers and recent highs, so the dominoes are often stood close together. That is why a few minutes can carry most of a day's total, and why the 1-hour view is the one to look at on a day that moved fast.

Longs and shorts are the two directions of the same trap. Longs are liquidated on a fall, shorts on a rise. A board that is mostly red says the market fell through crowded longs; mostly green says it squeezed crowded shorts. Neither says where it goes next — a flush of longs can mark a bottom or the start of a longer fall, and the board is a record of what already broke, not a signal.

Size is dollars, not damage. Bitcoin and Ethereum are large bubbles most days because more leverage sits on them than on everything else together. A smaller coin with a bubble its own size on the 1-hour view is the more unusual event, and usually the more interesting one.

04 The app

The market the leverage sits on

This page is one view of one thing: the positions that broke. The app it sits next to draws all 1,000 coins by size and price change, over periods from fifteen minutes to a year, in 24 currencies. Free, no ads, no account, and it runs in a browser tab as well as on a phone.