The position was made up of 38,986.528 Ether (ETH) and liquidated at the $1,434 price level, a single trader or trading entity lost a staggering $55 million in an Ether trade against Binance USD (BUSD) on crypto exchange Binance late Thursday. This amount was nearly 30% of all liquidated futures on Binance, suggesting a large firm or large Ether holder was hit hard in the sudden market plunge.
Ether dropped from $1,780 to as low as $1,560 within minutes, with trading volume surging from $6 billion to over $20 billion across exchanges. The asset then quickly recovered some of those losses amid late reports of U.S. securities regulators planning to approve Ether (ETH) futures ETFs for trading in the country. ETH traded at just over $1,690 in Asian evening hours on Friday – down 6% in the past 24 hours.
The price drop in Ether was one of the largest futures liquidations in over a year, higher than the market impact of crypto exchange FTX’s collapse. Highly leveraged longs, or bets on, higher prices were taken out in a textbook long squeeze event amid unsubstantiated rumors of SpaceX selling its Bitcoin holdings. Bitcoin fell 7% in the past 24 hours, registering its largest drop in recent months amid a period of low volatility. Meanwhile, XRP (XRP), Doge (DOGE) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) led losses among majors falling as much as 15%.