More than $107 million in long crypto positions were wiped out in a single hour on June 24, creating the kind of sudden carnage that makes leveraged trading feel less like a strategy and more like a coin flip.
The vast majority of those liquidations, somewhere between $105.59 million and $106.66 million, came from traders betting on prices going up. They were wrong.
What happened and why it matters
Here’s the thing about leveraged trading in crypto: it works brilliantly right up until the moment it doesn’t. Traders borrow funds to amplify their bets, which magnifies gains on the way up but creates a trapdoor on the way down. When prices drop past a certain threshold, exchanges automatically close positions to prevent further losses. That’s a liquidation.
The problem is that liquidations breed more liquidations. One trader gets wiped out, their position is force-sold, that pushes the price lower, which triggers the next liquidation. That cascading effect is exactly what played out on June 24, turning a dip into a $107 million rout in roughly 60 minutes.
