Wednesday’s selloff on Wall Street extended to the crypto market, which saw the industry’s market cap decline 3.6% to $2.3 trillion.
Bitcoin was trading at $64,260 at the time of writing, down 2.5% over the last 24 hours. Ether saw a steeper decline to $3,177, down nearly 8% over the same period.
The negative price action resulted in large scale liquidations, particularly for traders betting on higher prices for the top two digital assets. Data from Coinglass shows that crypto traders saw $290 million worth of liquidations in the last day, of which more $260 million was liquidated from long traders.
Ether liquidations topped $102 million, while bitcoin liquidations exceeded $81 million. In total, over 75,500 traders saw their positions liquidated, with the single largest liquidations order taking place on a BTC/USDT pair on Binance at a value of $11.78 million.
The sell-off comes just as bitcoin recovered from weeks of volatility, triggered by the German government selling bitcoin, and Mt. Gox starting to make creditor distributions. As the price of bitcoin reclaimed the $68,000 mark earlier this week, a majority of short-term bitcoin holders returned to profitability.
“The recent price surge has also been a welcome relief for bitcoin short-term holders (STHs), a proxy for new demand and recent buyers. This cohort saw over 90% of their supply fall into a loss in late July, putting them into a financially stressful position,” said analysts at Glassnode in their latest weekly newsletter.
