Over $470M in crypto liquidations as Bitcoin slides to four-month low

Thousand of traders have had their position liquidated across multiple markets following a volatile week in the cryptocurrency space.

According to data from cryptocurrency and futures trading platform Coinglass, more than $400 million worth of trader positions in the crypto market were liquidated on May 5. Notably, those who placed a bet on the market going higher lost over $340.30 million as long positions were wiped out. On the flip side, those who betted on the sustained drop of the market were also not spared as $67.3 million worth of short positions were also liquidated on the same day.

Bitcoin traders were the most affected by the liquidations from Thursday into Friday. More than 2,000 BTC valued at around $72.7 million were wiped out over a 24-hour window. Ethereum followed behind with $39.53 million worth of liquidations. Meanwhile, the liquidations continued into Saturday. As of press time, over 34,000 traders had been liquidated.

It is worth adding that a pair of newer altcoins that had recently witnessed big rallies were not also spared by the carnage. Fitness app STEPN (GMT) and Yuga Labs’ ApeCoin (APE) saw liquidations of $7.36 million and $5.27 million, respectively.

Weighing in on the crash, Santiment noted that this week’s correction is one of the largest capitulation events for Bitcoin in the past year.

Bitcoin is seeing its third-largest capitulation week in over a year, in terms of its ratio of on-chain transactions taken at a loss. The last time BTC was this far negative for this metric was Feb. 16th-22nd, when prices jumped +20% the following 9 days.

Bitcoin is currently trading at around $35,900, down by nearly 10% from its weekly high of $39,874 on Wednesday.