Well, that was a sharp little reminder of how things work around here. For about sixty minutes on Tuesday, the Ethereum derivatives market decided to flip a switch. According to the data from CoinGlass, it was a brutal hour for traders betting on a price rise. The numbers are pretty stark: $2.87 million in ETH positions got wiped out. And the real kicker? Almost all of it—like, 99%—was long positions.
I mean, just look at that. $2.82 million in long liquidations versus a paltry $48,160 for shorts. That’s a difference of over 5,800 percent. It’s a level of imbalance that really makes you pause. It wasn’t some slow bleed, either. This was a sudden, violent flush.
A Minute-By-Minute Squeeze
You could see it play out on the charts if you were watching. A sudden, sharp spike downward on the one-minute candle. The price of ETH plummeted to somewhere near $4,328. It didn’t stay there for long, maybe a minute or two. But that was all it took. That relatively small dip was apparently enough to trigger a cascade of margin calls. The leverage just got too heavy on one side, and the market gave it a quick shake.
And then, almost as if nothing had happened, the price bounced right back. It recovered those losses and pushed back above $4,350 within minutes. It’s almost ironic. The move that wiped out all those bullish bets reversed itself almost immediately. For the traders who got liquidated, that had to sting. A temporary dip cost them a real chunk of change.
How Ethereum Stacks Up
Put side-by-side with other big names, Ethereum’s little episode really stands out. Bitcoin’s total liquidations for that period were around half a million. Solana’s were in a similar ballpark. So this was very much an ETH-specific event, a localized tremor rather than a market-wide earthquake.
The broader 24-hour picture for crypto showed a more mixed bag, with hundreds of millions in positions closed across the board. But Tuesday’s brief frenzy was a different beast.
The Aftermath and The Lesson
So where does that leave us? At the time of writing, Ethereum’s spot price was holding fairly steady around $4,353. It’s still up a bit for the day, all things considered. The overall trend hasn’t really been damaged. This seems less like a change in direction and more like the market clearing out some over-leveraged positions.
But that’s the thing about derivatives. It doesn’t always take a massive crash. Sometimes a small, quick move is all it takes to reset the board. For the market, it was a blip. For the traders on the wrong side of those liquidations, it was a very expensive lesson.
