Shorts blown up as $135M in crypto positions liquidated in a single hour

Crypto traders betting against the market just got run over. In the 60 minutes ending 9:53 a.m. ET (14:53 UTC) Wednesday, exchanges force-closed $135 million worth of positions, and short sellers ate almost all of it — 89.6%, according to tokenpost.com.

Short liquidations came to roughly $121 million for the hour, while longs accounted for just $13.4881 million. That put short wipeouts at about nine times the long total, a gap of some $107.5 million. When that many shorts get flushed at once, it usually means price moved up hard and fast against them.

Zoom out and the damage looks even bigger. Over the rolling 24 hours through the same update, liquidations hit $576 million and 102,157 traders saw positions closed out. The single hour accounted for about 23% of that entire day's total, a striking concentration of pain in one narrow window.

The biggest individual casualty was a single position in Binance's ETHUSDT market, valued at about $5.0328 million — roughly 0.9% of the full 24-hour figure. No other liquidation came close enough to be called out in the data.

The numbers sketch a classic squeeze: leveraged bears crowded into one side, price pushed the other way, and the exchange's risk engine did the rest. The clock on this snapshot stopped at 14:53 UTC Wednesday, and the 24-hour tally kept running past it.