Bitcoin Dips Below $80,000: Nearly $500 Million Liquidated in 24 Hours, Ether Traders Hit Hardest
Bitcoin fell below $80,000 for the first time in a month, turning "will the Fed hike?" into a stack of forced-closure invoices.
Three key facts
In the past 24 hours, nearly $483 million in bitcoin and ether futures positions were liquidated. According to CoinDesk citing CoinGlass data, as crypto prices fell Thursday, ether traders took the worst hit — about $286 million in liquidations, versus $197 million for bitcoin.
Ether fell roughly twice as much as bitcoin. Bitcoin dropped about 3% to near $81,000, while ether lost more than 6% to roughly $2,350. The selling spread to smaller tokens: XRP and Solana's SOL fell about 5%, dogecoin about 6%, and Zcash about 13% (with nearly $19 million in liquidations). Notably, ether's futures market is considerably smaller than bitcoin's — about $30 billion in outstanding contracts versus $52 billion — yet it fell harder.
The trigger was macro, not on-chain. The immediate cause of heightened volatility was investor uncertainty over the Federal Reserve's next rate decision. The report also notes that after Wednesday's inflation data, bets on an October rate hike briefly spiked to nearly 50%, before cooling.
Wang Dou's Take
The ordering of these numbers is more interesting than the absolute amounts: ether fell twice as much as bitcoin, yet its market is far smaller. What does that mean? It means that for every dollar of price decline, the leverage stacked on ether is denser and more frantic. The same bad news, hitting a more leveraged instrument, always gets a more violent reaction.
What's really worth watching is that line "liquidation isn't the same as losing money." The report explains it clearly: these figures measure the value of positions closed, not the cash traders personally lost. Someone using $1,000 to control a $10,000 position loses their backing on a move of less than 10% against them. So when the news says "$500 million liquidated," the real meaning is: a group of people, using leverage others can't see, bet on a direction they couldn't afford.
The last layer is the macro transmission chain. This time the trigger wasn't a project blowing up or a chain getting hacked — it was an inflation report out of Washington. The crypto industry loves to talk about being "independent of traditional finance," but the reality is — the moment the Fed clears its throat, on-chain leverage coughs up blood. A market that shouts "decentralization" daily has its pricing power held by a few people who decide interest rates. That contrast is worth more than the drop itself.
Source: CoinDesk