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The crypto market experienced a significant crash over the weekend, liquidating over $19 billion in leveraged bets across various cryptocurrencies.
Friday's crash saw crypto's worst liquidation in terms of pure volume, with more than 10 times as much dollar value liquidated as the FTX crash in 2022.
Bitcoin's spot trading volume increased amid the sell-off as traders adjusted their positioning. Given the extent of the wipeout, one would naturally assume Friday to be the highest day volume for Bitcoin, but rather an intriguing detail has emerged.
In a recent tweet, Scott Melkel, host of the Wolf of All Streets podcast, shared an interesting detail about the Bitcoin price crash using Coinbase data.
Melkel pointed out that Friday’s crash was not the highest-volume day for Bitcoin on Coinbase this summer, as there were two bigger days in July, and in both instances, the price barely moved. The Bitcoin price saw small dips, which quickly went up.
This fact, according to Melkel, explains the market drop. The podcaster believes that the market crash was not a broad-based sell-off; instead, it was a leverage event. Melkel describes it as a "chain reaction of forced liquidations" and not spot panic.
Melkel added that this might also indicate that during the worst of the drop, trading on spot exchanges may have been partially frozen, meaning that real buyers could not step in even if they wanted to.
On-chain data reveals massive deleveraging
According to on-chain analytics platform Glassnode, Friday’s wipeout triggered the largest futures liquidation in Bitcoin’s history. Over $11 billion in open interest was erased as leverage was forcefully unwound. Glassnode tags the sell-off as a "historic deleveraging event" that has reset speculative excess across the market.
In line with the drop, funding rates across the crypto market fell to their lowest levels since the depths of the 2022 bear market. This, according to Glassnode, marked one of the most severe leverage resets in crypto history, with overleveraged bets flushed from the system.
At press time, Bitcoin was up 1.81% in the last 24 hours to $114,100, extending its recovery from Friday's low of $107,000.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team