What Set Off the Last Liquidation Cascade?
Big moves are usually blamed on news. The tape tells a simpler story: forced sellers. Our detector watches the real liquidation feed around the clock, flags any half hour where forced closures run far above their normal background, and files a forensic record: how much, which side, which coins, and what price did. This page is that case file.
Latest incident: $65M liquidated in 30 minutes, mostly longs, led by ETH.
The latest cascade, minute by minute
Price path one hour around the incident window (shaded). Forced selling begets forced selling: the steepest part of the move is usually the cascade itself, not the trigger.
Case file
| When (UTC) | Flushed | Side | Led by | BTC move |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-01 18:30 · 30m | $65M | 99% longs | ETH · BTC | -0.06% |
| 2026-07-31 14:00 · 30m | $56M | 96% longs | BTC · ETH | -0.93% |
The real liquidation tape starts 2026-07-30; every cascade since then is on file, and new ones are detected within the hour.
Methodology and honest caveats
Detection is mechanical: the real liquidation feed is bucketed into 30-minute windows, and a window qualifies when its total forced-closure notional exceeds both an absolute floor and a large multiple of the trailing-week median background. Contiguous hot windows merge into one incident. The thresholds are stored with each record.
Side attribution follows the tape: a forced sell closes a long, a forced buy closes a short. Totals cover the venues our feed records, so read them as a lower bound on the market-wide number, honestly labeled rather than extrapolated.
Cascades are detected within the hour, not tick by tick. For the live picture during an event, watch the liquidation map and 24h totals; this page is the record of what actually happened.
What is a liquidation cascade?
When price moves against leveraged positions hard enough, exchanges force-close them. Each forced close pushes price further, triggering the next tier of liquidations. That chain reaction is the cascade, and it is why crypto moves can be so much more violent than the news that started them.
Why does the long/short split matter?
It tells you who was wrong. A 95% long cascade means the crowd was leaning long into the drop, and the flush usually clears that positioning; the market often stabilizes once the forced sellers are done. Our pressure and liquidation-map pages show where the next crowd is building.
Are these all the liquidations in the market?
No, and we say so: the totals cover what our own feed records across the venues it watches. Venue-published liquidation numbers are widely known to understate reality; ours is a consistent, honestly-labeled lower bound rather than a guess at the true total.
Can I get alerted when a cascade starts?
The liq-burst posts on our X and Telegram fire on large bursts in near real time, and this page files the full forensic record within the hour.