1 hour bloodbath of 10.98 million! Are short sellers brutally slaughtered by the 'needle'?
In the early hours of July 9, the cryptocurrency market staged a 'long-short meat grinder': in just one hour, the entire network saw liquidations of 10.98 million USD, with over 95% of the liquidations coming from short positions, equivalent to 174,000 USD being forcibly cleared every minute! This data reveals that short sellers are becoming the 'primary victims' of the market's extreme volatility.
Why were the short positions precisely liquidated? There are three reasons:
Bitcoin suddenly surged in the middle of the night, rising nearly 0.5% within one hour. When the price rapidly broke through key resistance levels, the strong liquidation prices of highly leveraged short positions were densely distributed in this range, instantly triggering a 'panic liquidation'.
During the early morning, trading depth was weak, and a small number of large orders could trigger a 'needle' in the price. For example, a large ETH buy order could cause the price to deviate by 2%, directly breaking through the short sellers' stop-loss lines.
The deadline for the delivery of Trump's tariff letters on the 9th is approaching, intensifying the market's speculation on policy shifts, and the short sellers' bets on a 'black swan' turned against them.
The leverage ghost behind the liquidations:
Short sellers often use leverage of more than 20 times. If Bitcoin rises by just 0.5%, a 10x leveraged short position would incur a 5% loss, hitting the forced liquidation red line.
Chain reaction of continuous liquidations: Once a position is forcibly liquidated, the exchange sells at market price, further pushing up prices, creating a 'short killing short' death spiral—this is the main reason why the liquidation volume of short positions reached four times that of long positions within one hour.
'Liquidation is not an accident, but an inevitable cost of leverage games.': In March 2025, a similar situation led to the liquidation of 90,000 people in a single day, with losses amounting to 200 million USD;
In the future, if Bitcoin surges toward the 110,000 mark due to favorable policies, the next concentrated area for short liquidations will be between 109,200 and 109,800, potentially triggering a larger-scale liquidation wave.
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