Longs Take 91.7% of the Liquidations as Bitcoin Nears $80,000

Bitcoin traded near $80,700 on Thursday morning, down about 3% over 24 hours, after a session that carried it below $81,000 and left leveraged long positions holding nearly all of the damage. CoinGlass figures cited by two outlets put longs at 91.7% of everything liquidated across the market. The totals themselves do not agree. Ether fell harder than bitcoin and accounted for more liquidated value, and XRP lost around 5% on the day. The slide extended the move that followed Wednesday's September inflation print.

Four totals, one data provider

The tallies read like different events. CoinDesk, checking CoinGlass during Asian morning hours and publishing at 04:25 UTC, headlined nearly $1 billion liquidated while its body gave $483 million for bitcoin and ether futures alone, with the larger figure left unbroken down. A KuCoin flash 20 minutes later carried two numbers side by side: $485 million credited to Crypto Briefing and close to $1 billion credited to BeInCrypto, neither with a stated window. AMBCrypto, filing at 06:00 US Eastern time, had $957.77 million. Crypto News Flash, an hour and a half after that, had $972.44 million across 182,527 traders.

Part of the spread is mechanical. A rolling 24-hour window read at four different hours of one morning covers four different periods, and the cascade was still running. It does not explain the rest. The two detailed tallies came from the same provider and differ by about $15 million, and we could not establish which read supersedes which.

Ether carried the bigger share

Both detailed counts put ether ahead of bitcoin. AMBCrypto gave $292.83 million in liquidated ether positions against $203.01 million in bitcoin. Crypto News Flash gave $292.81 million for ether and said about 92% of that was long. CoinDesk's narrower count split its $483 million as roughly $286 million ether and $197 million bitcoin. The ordering holds across all three even where the amounts do not.

Spot prices moved the same way. Ether was down between 5.8% and 6.4% depending on which snapshot is read, at about $2,357, while bitcoin's loss stayed closer to 3%. Crypto News Flash logged an intraday low of $80,125 against a session open of $81,566; that low appears in one place only and is not confirmed elsewhere. CoinDesk's large-cap index was off 4.61%.

Four fund categories out, one in

Exchange-traded funds told a quieter version of the same story. US spot bitcoin funds shed about $262 million on Wednesday, Cointelegraph reported from SoSoValue data, reversing $176 million of inflows the day before. That same piece prints $261 million in its headline and about $262 million in its text. Week to date the figure is $151 million out, against $681 million the week before. Ether funds lost about $130 million on the day and $190 million across the week, and Solana funds recorded an eighth consecutive session of withdrawals at $1.3 million.

XRP was the exception. Its funds took in roughly $740,000 on Wednesday and are the only one of five tracked categories positive for the week. October has turned twice already: bitcoin funds erased the month's inflows in a single session on 8 October, then bought again on Tuesday.

Thursday's calendar is doing the deciding

Rate expectations are driving most of this. Implied odds of a US rate increase this month briefly reached about 50% on Wednesday, up from 22%, before cooling again.

"I don't feel urgent that we have to decide with a limited set of information. I think we have the time that we need," San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly told Reuters.

September producer prices, retail sales and weekly jobless claims were all due on Thursday, alongside a G20 finance meeting and the Federal Reserve's Beige Book. Sentiment gauges are split too: CoinMarketCap's Fear and Greed read 48 on Thursday morning, KuCoin's daily report 53, down from 62, at midnight UTC. One attributed forecast points up: Matt Mena of 21Shares told AMBCrypto that bitcoin has averaged a 1.21% daily return in the week after a hot core inflation print since 2023. No second outlet carries it. The levels traders are watching all sit above the market.