Market Whiplash: $286M in Leveraged Trades Crushed Amid BTC, ETH Turbulence

Sharp volatility around the Federal Reserve’s rate decision forced nearly 90,000 traders out of their positions, with losses split almost evenly between bullish and bearish bets.

Although major cryptocurrencies show little net change over the past 24 hours, that stability hides intense back-and-forth price action during the Fed event, which flushed leveraged futures positions and triggered widespread liquidations.

CoinGlass data shows roughly $286 million in positions were wiped out across 87,294 traders during the period. Of that, $186 million came from longs and $100 million from shorts—pointing to a market that swung aggressively in both directions before settling near its starting point.

Bitcoin accounted for about $57 million in liquidations, divided almost equally between $28 million in long positions and $29 million in shorts. Prices moved within a tight range between $63,247 and $64,660, yet even that roughly 2% swing was enough to clear out traders on both sides.

The largest single liquidation was a $2.9 million bitcoin position on Binance.

Ether saw the biggest overall liquidations at around $58 million, with losses tilted 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 on the day.

Most of the liquidations were concentrated around Wednesday’s Fed announcement, which drove erratic price moves and accounted for approximately $188 million in wiped-out positions. Long trades alone made up $130 million of that total.

An additional pocket of losses came from equity-linked perpetual futures traded on crypto exchanges. About $19 million in SanDisk positions were liquidated, alongside $10 million in Micron, $7 million in SK Hynix, and $7 million in SOXL, a leveraged semiconductor ETF. These instruments track traditional equities but trade on crypto platforms with similar leverage.

Nearly all of these losses were on the long side. Micron liquidations were heavily skewed—around $9 million in longs versus $1 million in shorts—while SanDisk showed a roughly two-to-one imbalance. Traders had been positioned for continued upside in the AI memory sector but were caught off guard by a sharp selloff in chip stocks.

The timing proved costly. SK Hynix plunged 17% on Wednesday despite reporting a 557% jump in profit that fell short of expectations. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Kospi index has dropped more than 40% from its June peak.

This marks the second such disruption this week involving equity perpetuals on crypto exchanges. Earlier, a single trade on a thin Korean pre-market venue sent Trade.xyz’s SK Hynix contract down 19%, triggering $60 million in liquidations—losses the exchange has since agreed to reimburse.