Bitcoin Loses $70,000 as Two Liquidation Counts Fail to Agree

Bitcoin traded below $70,000 early on Friday, and the counts of what that cost leveraged traders do not match. CoinDesk, filing at 03:37 UTC, put 24-hour crypto futures liquidations at more than $1.3 billion, with bitcoin accounting for $677 million of it. The headline CoinDesk put on that same page says $1.2 billion. crypto.news, publishing about ninety minutes later and citing the same Coinglass dashboard, also says $1.2 billion. Both figures were in circulation before Europe opened.

Where the price went

The leading cryptocurrency fell to $69,000, which CoinDesk calls the lowest level since 19 August. Ether lost $2,000 for the first time since August; crypto.news had it near $1,935 on Friday after a touch of $1,917. XRP traded close to $1. Solana held below $80. Live tickers read at 06:15 UTC put bitcoin around $68,200 on CoinDesk, on crypto.news and on the LMAX Digital feed carried by The Block, so the slide had gone further still by the European morning.

The three sites agree on the level and not on the fall. CoinDesk's ticker showed bitcoin down 7.15% over 24 hours, crypto.news 7.26%, and the LMAX feed 4.52%, while the body of the crypto.news report says about 6.7%. None of them states the window it measures, and we could not establish which window each one uses.

Two counts, one dashboard

A liquidation is the forced close of a leveraged trade: once losses eat the margin a trader posted, the exchange sells the position out from under them. Both outlets sourced their totals to Coinglass, which aggregates those closures across exchanges. They published different numbers anyway. The gap is roughly $100 million, and one of the two figures sits inside a single publication, body against headline. Neither piece says which count supersedes the other.

CoinDesk alone reports that nearly $500 million of the total went as bitcoin broke $70,000, and that the largest single position closed was a long bitcoin bet worth more than $31 million on Hyperliquid, a decentralized venue. No other account opened for this story carries either detail. On ether, crypto.news puts 24-hour liquidations at $249.8 million, of which $225.9 million were long positions, the same lopsided split the desk recorded in October when longs absorbed over 90% of the losses below $80,000.

The dollar, and what neither account settles

CoinDesk anchors Friday's move to the currency market. Its report has the Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against a basket of other currencies, above 103 and at its highest since April 2025, up nearly 2% since early October. That reading appears in no other account checked here. The same report puts bitcoin down 17% for the quarter and ties firmer December rate pricing to the October inflation print, the reading that took bitcoin under $74,000 earlier in the week.

crypto.news tells it differently. That account leads on weakness in equities and on continued withdrawals from US spot funds, and it then draws its own line under the claim: the stock market weakness alone, it says, does not establish what triggered the selloff. Two outlets, two drivers, no proof either way.

Much of the leverage that sat in the market on Thursday is gone now, and the tally of it will keep moving for another day. Fund flow tables settle late and lag the price by a session. Until Coinglass revises its own figure, both numbers stand side by side, drawn from one dashboard hours apart.

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