Key Insights:
- Bitcoin news indicates about $794 million worth of BTC longs got liquidated over the past one week.
- The bets got wiped when BTC slipped to around $87,800.
- After a big liquidation flush, traders often jump back in on the bounce because the market feels cleaner and the setup looks safer.
Bitcoin news on-chain insights report about $794 million worth of leveraged Bitcoin long positions were wiped out this week as BTC slipped to around $87,800. In essence, perpetual futures now do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to Bitcoin’s short-term price moves.
The latest shakeout made that clear, because once long trades piled up, it didn’t take much for the market to flip into forced selling.
Recent trading followed a pattern many traders know too well. Bitcoin bounced, people leaned in with leverage, and funding started favoring longs. Then the market pushed into the weakest spots, knocked out overexposed positions, and the liquidations did the rest.
Bitcoin News: $794M Bitcoin Longs Got Rekt This Week
Bitcoin keeps whipping around in the $80,000s, and it’s not mainly because regular buyers are piling in or cashing out. It’s mostly futures traders moving their leverage around.
This week, that leverage snapped. According to Coinglass, $794 million worth of long bets got wiped out when BTC slipped to around $87,800
Even after that flush, liquidation heatmaps still flagged heavy danger zones stretching down toward $80,000.
That’s the bigger point. Perpetual futures now sit at the center of Bitcoin’s short-term price action, not on the sidelines. Kaiko estimated that BTC perpetuals accounted for about 68% of Bitcoin’s trading volume in 2025. It also said derivatives made up more than 75% of total crypto trading activity.
So when a leveraged product becomes the main place where prices are set, the market starts to behave differently.
In that setup, Bitcoin’s short-term moves rely less on fresh spot buyers. Instead, they hinge on where traders stack risk, how much it costs to hold those bets, and how quickly exchanges are forced to unwind positions when prices turn.
Bitcoin Perps Engine Behind Bitcoin’s Liquidation Cycle
Perpetual futures stay close to the spot price by using a system called funding.
When the perp price sits above the spot index, funding turns positive. That means traders who are long pay the traders who are short. When the perp price drops below spot, funding flips negative, and shorts end up paying longs.
In simple terms, funding is a regular fee that shifts between the two sides based on the gap between the perp price and the spot index. Exchanges recalculate it several times a day, usually on an eight-hour schedule.
However, funding does more than keep perp prices close to spot. It also nudges traders in certain directions, and over time, it shapes where the crowd piles in.
When the market is rising, and crypto news is positive, many traders chase the move with leverage. Perpetuals make that simple, and the cost of holding those bets shows up in the funding payments.
If the funding rate stays positive for a while, it usually means longs have become crowded. In other words, traders are paying just to stay long. That doesn’t automatically signal a drop or a rally, but it does make the market jumpier. Even a small dip can hit those leveraged positions fast, because they don’t have much room for error.
That extra sensitivity can quickly turn into a vicious loop once liquidations kick in as per past crypto news.
On Binance, a liquidation starts when a trader’s collateral drops below the minimum margin needed to keep the position open. Once that line is crossed, the exchange steps in, takes over the trade, and sells it into the market to cut its own risk.
Those forced sales push the price down even more. Then the next batch of over-leveraged longs gets squeezed, more positions get liquidated, and the selling feeds on itself.
That’s the treadmill. After a big liquidation flush, traders often jump back in on the bounce because the market feels cleaner and the setup looks safer.
But if price keeps chopping around, it doesn’t take much to restart the pain. The next drop hits a new pile of borrowed bets, more traders get forced out, and the whole thing starts over.
Daily Price Swings Often Feel Random
That’s why the daily price swings can feel random. The bigger economic story matters, but in the short run, liquidations often drive the move more than the headlines.
Bitcoin news might spark the first move, but the follow-through is often shaped by how positions sit on exchanges and how quickly they get forced out.
Studies on crypto perpetuals have pointed to the same idea. They found that perp trading can shift spot liquidity and ramp up activity around funding settlement times. In plain terms, when perps dominate, the market starts reacting to itself, and price moves become more mechanical than emotional.
The long liquidations this week help put the drop into context. They suggest Bitcoin’s slide below $90,000 looked more like a leverage wipeout than a wave of spot investors rushing for the exits.
In this kind of market, moves rarely end in one clean hit. The pattern usually comes in steps. First you get a sharp drop. Then comes a calmer bounce as traders re-enter. After that, price often dips again as the market searches for the next pocket of liquidity.
That’s where those liquidation zones matter. When heatmaps show clusters stretching toward $80,000, they’re basically pointing to levels where many traders would get forced out. And when the order book is thin, price tends to drift toward those pools because that’s where the action sits.