Crypto Whipsaw: $286M in Leveraged Positions Liquidated as Bitcoin, Ether Swing Wildly

Volatility surrounding the Federal Reserve’s rate decision wiped out positions for roughly 90,000 traders, with losses split unusually evenly between bullish and bearish bets.

Major cryptocurrencies appear flat over the past 24 hours, but that stability hides sharp back-and-forth price swings during the Fed meeting that flushed out leveraged futures positions and sparked heavy liquidations.

In total, about $286 million in positions were liquidated across 87,294 traders over the period, according to CoinGlass. Long positions accounted for $186 million of those losses, while shorts made up $100 million—highlighting a market that moved aggressively in both directions before ending near where it began.

Bitcoin data shows that both sides of the market were hit. Around $57 million in BTC positions were liquidated, split almost evenly between $28 million in longs and $29 million in shorts. Prices fluctuated between $63,247 and $64,660, a narrow range of roughly 2% that was still enough to trigger liquidations on both sides.

The largest single liquidation was a $2.9 million bitcoin position on Binance.

Ether saw the highest total liquidations at approximately $58 million, with losses skewed toward long positions. Prices ranged between $1,850 and $1,920 during the same period. At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading near $63,900—largely unchanged over 24 hours—while ether hovered around $1,900.

Most of the liquidations occurred during Wednesday’s Fed rate decision, which drove erratic price action and accounted for roughly $188 million in wiped-out positions. Long trades alone made up $130 million of that figure.

A notable share of the losses also came from equity-linked futures traded on crypto exchanges. Around $19 million in SanDisk positions were liquidated, along with $10 million in Micron, $7 million in SK Hynix, and another $7 million in SOXL, a leveraged semiconductor ETF. These products are perpetual futures tied to stocks and funds but traded on crypto platforms with similar leverage.

The majority of these liquidations were long positions. Micron liquidations were heavily skewed, roughly $9 million in longs versus $1 million in shorts, while SanDisk saw a two-to-one imbalance. Traders had been using crypto derivatives to bet on gains in the AI memory sector but were caught off guard by a sharp downturn in chip stocks.

The timing proved particularly unfavorable. SK Hynix dropped 17% on Wednesday despite reporting a 557% profit increase that fell short of expectations. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Kospi index has declined more than 40% from its June peak.

This marks the second incident this week involving equity perpetuals on crypto platforms. Earlier, a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue sent Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19%, triggering $60 million in liquidations—losses the exchange has since agreed to reimburse.