Bitcoin Slips Under $74K as $356M in Leveraged Bets Get Wiped Out

Bitcoin changed hands at $73,703 around 8:45 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, nursing a 1.3% daily slide and a 3.5% weekly loss. The damage underneath was uglier: Coinglass liquidation logs show 80,898 traders were forced out over 24 hours for a combined $356.16 million. Longs ate $280.40 million of that, against just $75.77 million in short liquidations.

Ethereum led the wreckage with $117.61 million liquidated, ahead of bitcoin's $86.14 million and solana's $23.45 million. The pain skewed almost entirely to bulls — longs made up 82.3% of BTC liquidations and 88.4% of ETH's. The single biggest casualty was a $14.31 million BTC-USD long on the decentralized perps DEX Hyperliquid, while Binance accounted for 42.6% of all liquidations across tracked exchanges.

The selloff caps a short-lived post-election bounce that never found solid footing. Bitfinex analysts told Bitcoin.com News the rally leaned on derivatives positioning rather than real spot buying. They put it bluntly: a market propped up by perpetual longs instead of spot bids breaks in cascades rather than grinding through levels — and that's how the cost basis was lost on Sunday.

Options positioning is split. Coinglass data shows 240,193.43 BTC in outstanding calls against 186,945.7 BTC in puts, giving calls a 56.23% share of open interest. But the last 24 hours of trading flipped the other way, with puts at 22,336.57 BTC versus 20,920.15 BTC in calls. Deribit's biggest listed position is the Nov. 13 $81,000 call at 8,306.8 BTC, followed by December's $80,000 call at 8,028.8 BTC and the Dec. 25 $100,000 call at 6,612.9 BTC. Downside bets sit further out, with December's $60,000 and $40,000 puts holding 6,521.2 BTC and 5,504.5 BTC.

Where traders are actually trading tells a nearer story. The Nov. 13 $74,000 put tops Deribit's volume rankings at 3,563.4 BTC, with the Nov. 27 $72,000 put next at 2,060.8 BTC — both sitting close to the current price. Max pain levels land near $75,000 for Nov. 13, $79,000 for Nov. 27 and $76,000 for the hefty Dec. 25 expiry, which carries roughly $11 billion in notional value on Deribit. CME options exposure has thinned considerably from its early-2026 peaks.

Futures leverage remains stacked. Binance holds $10.84 billion in open interest, ahead of CME at $7.33 billion, Bybit at $6.10 billion, MEXC at $5.15 billion and Gate at $4.54 billion. Binance's open interest climbed 2.20% in 24 hours and CME's rose 1.61%, while BingX shed a steep 25.27%. Funding rates spent February through May in negative territory before turning mostly positive in the second half of 2026, though Bitfinex noted funding cooled sharply after the election rally. Their read: cheap leverage means longs are no longer crowded, not that anyone is buying. Bitfinex expects bitcoin to stay inside the $72,350 to $79,400 range implied by Nov. 13 options, with trading clustered in the lower half, and flags $75,900 to $77,500 as a potential selling zone. Tuesday's October CPI didn't help — headline inflation rose 0.4% month over month against a 0.3% forecast, and core came in at 0.3%, also above expectations.