Extreme leverage drove $500 million worth of BTC liquidations in one hour

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The Bitcoin markets emphatically rejected the $60,000 price range on March 15, with excessive leverage driving a record $500 million worth of long liquidations over just 60 minutes.

Glassnode’s founders, Jan & Yann, emphasized the new record hourly Bitcoin for liquidations, noting that more than half open futures contracts prior to the margin calls were leveraged by at least 20 times.

However, data from Bybt suggests $800 million worth of liquidations were processed over just 15 minutes.

According to crypto market data aggregator, Datamish, the past 24 hours saw 292 positions liquidated for $94.5 million on derivatives exchange, BitMEX. On Bitfinex, 488 positions were liquidated for roughly $100 million over the same period.

The second largest single-day liquidation came on Feb. 22, when BTC fell from its then all-time high of $58,300 to around $47,000. As reported by Cointelegraph, $5.9 billion worth of futures contracts were liquidated during the crash. 

Since its March 14 peak of $61,000, Bitcoin has corrected by 12.3% to $53,500 during Asian trading on Tuesday, March 16. BTC has since produced a slight recovery, last changing hands for $54,600 as of this writing.

This latest correction is the third major retracement of the current bull cycle.

While the Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index suggested the markets were in a state of “extreme greed” last week, the retracement has seen the indicator fall back into the “greed” category with a rank of 71 — indicating a significant cooling of market sentiment.