Bitcoin falls near $55,000 level as over $1 billion in crypto futures are liquidated

Bitcoin • March 15, 2021, 6:00AM EDT
UPDATED: March 15, 2021, 6:16AM EDT
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The price of bitcoin has fallen near $55,000 level from around $61,000 on Saturday as derivatives positions worth over $1 billion get force liquidated by crypto exchanges.

In the last 24 hours, around $1.15 billion worth of open interest was liquidated by crypto exchanges, according to tracker Bybt.com. That means crypto exchanges liquidated traders' overleveraged positions.

Traders overleverage, or trade on margin, thinking that bitcoin's price would go up and they would benefit more. But when bitcoin's price goes below the liquidation price of their positions, exchanges force liquidate or close their positions because traders cannot fulfill margin requirements of their leveraged positions.

More than 190,000 traders were liquidated in the last 24 hours, and the largest single liquidation occurred on Huobi for bitcoin, valued at around $19 million, according to Bybt.

In terms of total liquidations across exchanges, Binance had the largest share (around $435 million), followed by Bybit (around $328 million) and Huobi (around $192 million). In terms of crypto assets, bitcoin positions formed most liquidations, followed by ether (ETH) and Polkadot (DOT) at the time of writing.

Bitcoin is currently trading at around $55,500, according to TradingView.

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Yogita Khatri is a senior reporter at The Block and the author of The Funding newsletter. As our longest-serving editorial member, Yogita has been instrumental in breaking numerous stories, exclusives and scoops. With over 3,000 articles to her name, Yogita is The Block's most-published and most-read author of all time. Before joining The Block, Yogita wrote for CoinDesk and The Economic Times. You can reach her at [email protected] or follow her latest updates on X at @Yogita_Khatri5.

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