48 hours of crypto liquidations: which side, which venue, which coins

How much was liquidated in crypto derivatives over the last two days, and on which side? We froze our liquidation totals for the 48 hours up to 28 October 2026, 18:25 UTC, across the four venues we collect: Binance, Bybit, Hyperliquid and Lighter. The short answer: shorts were liquidated about twice as much as longs, and most of the volume came from one exchange. This post breaks the total down and explains what the numbers include.

The total

Over the 48 hours, $174M of positions were liquidated in 70,409 liquidation orders. Shorts accounted for $117M and longs for $56.8M, so 67% of the liquidated size was short and 33% long.

A short is liquidated when the price rises far enough against it. A window in which shorts dominate the liquidations is a window in which the price moves that mattered were upward moves, at least for the leveraged positions that did not have enough margin. It says nothing about the next move.

By venue

The venues contributed very different amounts:

• Binance: $125M
• Bybit: $27.2M
• Hyperliquid: $21.4M
• Lighter: $296K

These are not like-for-like numbers, and the difference matters when you compare them:

• Binance and Bybit totals are what the exchanges publish on their public liquidation streams, summed by us. They are lower bounds: Binance pushes at most one liquidation per symbol and second, and Bybit is covered for its top 100 symbols.
• Hyperliquid totals are fill-confirmed liquidations of the wallets we track: a liquidation counts only when the wallet's own fills mark the trade as one. Liquidations of wallets we do not track are not in the number.
• Lighter totals are the trades that Lighter flags as liquidations on its public trade stream.

So the venue split shows where we can see liquidations, not the full market share of each venue. The methodology page lists every source and how it is used.

By coin

The coins with the largest liquidated size over the two days:

1. BTC: $41.5M
2. ETH: $41.4M
3. Q: $11.5M
4. SOL: $6.1M
5. ZEC: $5.6M

The two largest markets were almost level with each other, and together they made up about half of the total. Below them the amounts drop quickly, which is the usual shape: a few large markets carry most of the leverage, and with it most of the liquidations.

The last four hours

For comparison, the four hours up to the same snapshot:

In the last 4 hours of the window, $9.6M was liquidated in 4,820 orders, and the two sides were close to even: $4.8M long and $4.8M short. The short-heavy total of the two days came from earlier in the window, not from its end. BTC again led the coin list with $2.6M.

That is why one total for a long window can hide a lot. The liquidations page lets you switch between windows and see each hour as a bar, long and short apart.

What a liquidation is

A liquidation is a forced close. When a leveraged position loses so much that its remaining margin no longer covers the maintenance margin, the venue closes it at market. A long is closed against the bids, a short against the offers, so each forced close pushes the price a little further in the direction of the move that caused it. Several of them close together can speed up a move for a short time.

How to read liquidation totals

• Size, not count. The order count depends on how each venue reports its liquidations, so it is hard to compare. The dollar size is the better measure of how much leverage was removed.
• Side tells you the direction of the pain. Short liquidations come with rising prices, long liquidations with falling ones. A two-sided window usually means the price swung both ways.
• Totals are reported, not complete. As above, exchange streams undercount. Use them to compare windows on the same venue rather than to state a market-wide figure.
• Liquidations and levels belong together. Liquidations are what already happened; a liquidation heatmap shows where the next ones would happen at the current positions.

Where to find more

• Daily and weekly summaries with the same data are in our reports.
• The largest single liquidations are listed one by one.
• The glossary explains a liquidation price in one sentence.

Limits of the data

• Four venues. Only the sources that are switched on are counted; other exchanges are not included.
• Lower bounds. Exchange streams publish only part of their liquidations, as explained above.
• Frozen. The numbers in this post are fixed at the snapshot time. The live pages keep counting.