One hour, $460 million. You come home from work, you open the app, and red jumps in your face. Bitcoin broke through the $82,000 support while Ethereum slipped below $2,500, and Coinglass showed at 5:55 p.m. nearly $460 million in positions erased in sixty minutes.
The first flashes on social networks spoke of 185 million dollars. The counter didn't stop there (it rarely stops when asked politely). Two weeks after the 230 million dollars liquidated below 84,000 dollars, the leverage has just resumed a slap and the altcoins followed without being asked.
Key Points
Bitcoin fell back below $82,000, Ethereum below $2,500
Coinglass showed at 5:55 p.m. nearly $460 million liquidated over one hour and $879 million over twenty-four hours.
Oil above $102, US rates at the highest since 2002 and ETF exits, the stage was set
Solana, XRP and Dogecoin lose between 5 and 6%, Zcash drops by 14%
Bitcoin below $82,000, Ethereum drops 2,500
A quick recap for those who were in the meeting. The double passage under the round thresholds was completed in a few minutes. Bitcoin lost $82,000 and was trading around $81,400 late in the afternoon, down 2.4% over twenty-four hours. Ethereum is doing worse, -4.5% below $2,500, with half of its high of $4,950 gone in smoke.
For Bitcoin, the decline has reached 35% since the record of $126,000 set in October 2025. It was 32% on the first anniversary of the peak, just two days ago.
The $185 million reported by Watcher.Guru was just an appetizer. Coinglass showed at 5:55 p.m. $461 million liquidated over a rolling hour, including 432 million long positions, and $879 million over twenty-four hours for just over 150,000 accounts. An important detail: Ethereum collected 153 million dollars per hour compared to 89 million for Bitcoin.
Still, these figures are a floor. Aggregators feed on the platforms' public feeds (Binance's has only broadcast one liquidation order per second since April 2021), so much so that the volumes actually executed often exceed the displayed figure.
There is nothing mysterious about the culprit, and he is not wearing a hood. Brent returned to $102 after the tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, the US ten-year rate hit 5.36% on Wednesday (the highest since 2002) and spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $487 million outflow on October 7 according to SoSoValue. We told you this morning how oil opened the road to $80,000. At $81,400, there is $1,400 of margin left.
Everything fits in a loop. A leveraged long position does not wait for the opinion of its owner: when the margin no longer covers the latent loss, the platform engine sells at the market price, which pushes the price a little lower and triggers the next row of positions. Dominoes, but with your money. The more the orders are concentrated around a round number, the more violent the fuse.
Let's still keep a sense of proportion. On October 10, 2025, the same mechanism had wiped out nearly $19 billion in positions in twenty-four hours and affected more than 1.6 million accounts. On this scale, 879 million dollars in one day is a hiccup: a local purge, which resets the lever of a handful of pairs without emptying the book.
Cash holders do not liquidate anything. Strategy held 848,000 BTC as of October 4 for an average entry price of $75,441, and there are no automatic margin calls hitting bitcoins held without leverage. Michael Saylor can sleep, he has almost $6,000 worth of mattress left per bitcoin.
Altcoins: Solana, XRP and Dogecoin follow Bitcoin in the decline
And altcoins in all this? They follow, only worse, as usual. As of the 5:55 p.m. Coinglass reading, Solana was down 6.2% over twenty-four hours towards $109, XRP was down 5.4% to $1.35, Dogecoin was down 6% and BNB was down 4.2% to $737. Litecoin and Chainlink returned 5.7% and 6.9% respectively.
The prize went to Zcash, down 14.4% to $1,136 on the same reading, with $35 million in long positions liquidated in one day. Only gold looked down on the scene, at $4,118 per ounce (+0.25%).
