More Shorts Than Longs Were Liquidated in 24 Hours. One Coin Went the Other Way

The short version: Liquidation totals are a favourite of crypto headlines. A big number, one direction, a quick story. We looked at one ordinary 24-hour window in our own summary of public exchange data. Across four large contracts, more shorts than longs were closed out by force. But the four coins did not tell the same story.

What the headline says

There is no outside headline behind this one, and no outside figure. The pattern we are looking at is the familiar one: a single total such as "shorts liquidated" gets reported, and readers take it as a statement about the whole market.

A liquidation is an exchange closing a leveraged position because the trader's collateral no longer covers it. A liquidated short means a bet on lower prices was closed; a liquidated long is the reverse. The figures below cover USDT perpetual contracts for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP on Bybit and Binance only. Other exchanges are not in our data.

What our data shows

For the 24 hours to 07:00 Istanbul time on 2 October:

• All four contracts combined: shorts $6.62M · longs $3.49M
• Bitcoin: shorts $3.80M · longs $1.75M, across 673 orders
• Ether: shorts $1,914,125 · longs $1,151,231
• Solana: shorts $729,002 · longs $242,568
• XRP: shorts $184,251 · longs $346,645

Three of the four lean the same way. XRP does not: there, more longs than shorts were liquidated in the same window.

Open interest, the amount of contracts still open, also split in two. Over the same 24 hours on Binance it rose for Bitcoin (+1.53%) and Ether (+1.31%) and fell for Solana (−3.68%) and XRP (−2.19%).

And the price. In our daily records, Bitcoin closed at $83,553.85 on 30 September, $84,853.10 on 1 October and $84,497.21 on 2 October. Higher on the first of those two days, lower on the second.

One total, four coins, two directions. A liquidation figure describes positions that were already closed. It is a record of the past day, not a map of the next one.

Why this matters

A combined figure is easy to quote and easy to over-read. Here, the Bitcoin contract alone accounts for more than half of the short-side total, so the "market-wide" number is mostly one coin. The smallest of the four moved against it.

We also do not claim that the liquidations moved the price, or that the price moved the liquidations. Both happened in the same window; our data does not separate one from the other.

Our approach at TRENDEU is to put the parts next to the total and say what they show. In this window they show a lean, not a consensus.