Turbulence around the Federal Reserve’s rate decision forced roughly 90,000 traders out of positions, with losses split in an unusually balanced way between bulls and bears.
While major cryptocurrencies show little net change over the past 24 hours, that calm masks sharp intraday swings tied to the Fed event, which shook out leveraged futures traders and triggered a wave of liquidations.
Data from CoinGlass shows about $286 million in positions were wiped out across 87,294 traders during the period. Of that, $186 million came from long positions and $100 million from shorts—reflecting a market that swung aggressively in both directions before ending near its starting point.
Bitcoin saw liquidations totaling around $57 million, almost evenly divided between $28 million in longs and $29 million in shorts. Prices moved within a relatively tight band between $63,247 and $64,660, yet even that modest range was enough to force liquidations on both sides of the trade.
The largest single wipeout was a $2.9 million bitcoin position on Binance.
Ether recorded the highest overall liquidations at roughly $58 million, with losses skewed toward long positions, as prices fluctuated between $1,850 and $1,920. At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading near $63,900 and ether around $1,900—both largely unchanged over the day.
Most of the damage occurred during Wednesday’s Fed announcement, when erratic price action triggered approximately $188 million in liquidations, including $130 million from long positions alone.
An additional pocket of losses emerged from equity-linked futures traded on crypto platforms. Around $19 million in SanDisk positions were liquidated, along with $10 million in Micron, $7 million in SK Hynix, and $7 million in SOXL, a leveraged semiconductor ETF. These instruments mirror stocks and funds but trade as perpetual futures with crypto-style leverage.
Nearly all of these liquidations were long positions. Micron’s losses were heavily tilted, about $9 million in longs versus $1 million in shorts, while SanDisk’s were roughly two-to-one in favor of longs. Traders had been positioning for continued upside in the AI memory trade but were caught off guard by a sharp selloff in chip stocks.
The timing proved costly. SK Hynix plunged 17% on Wednesday despite reporting profits up 557%, missing expectations. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Kospi index has fallen more than 40% from its June peak.
This is the second such incident this week involving equity perpetuals on crypto exchanges. Earlier, a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue caused Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract to drop 19%, triggering $60 million in liquidations—losses the exchange has since pledged to reimburse.
