Crypto Liquidations Topped $150 Billion In 2025, CoinGlass Report Shows

Liquidation levels hit a staggering $150 billion this year, according to fresh data from CoinGlass. The figure marks a new record for forced position closures across global crypto markets.

Where the Pain Hit Hardest

Leverage got crushed. The report highlights how over-extended traders—chasing parabolic moves or betting against the trend—faced margin calls as volatility spiked. It wasn't a single event but a series of cascading liquidations that fed on themselves, amplifying price swings.

The Domino Effect in Action

Major exchanges saw billions wiped from leveraged positions in minutes during peak volatility. This created a self-reinforcing cycle: large liquidations triggered sharper price moves, which then triggered more liquidations. The data underscores the inherent risk of high leverage in an asset class already known for its wild rides—a classic case of using a flame-thrower in a fireworks factory.

A Record-Setting Year for Risk

The $150 billion tally for 2025 isn't just a big number; it's a benchmark for market froth and trader overconfidence. It reflects a year where aggressive speculation met sudden, brutal reality checks. For traditional finance veterans watching from the sidelines, it's just another Tuesday—proof that the 'greater fool' theory remains a popular, if expensive, investment strategy.

Crypto Averaged $400 To $500 Million Liquidations Every Day

CoinGlass has released a new annual crypto derivatives market report, carrying insights about how the sector changed in 2025. When it comes to the derivatives market, one thing that stood out in the year was the infamous liquidation squeeze that occurred back in October.

The massive liquidation event occurred on October 10th, as Bitcoin crashed just a few days after setting a new all-time high (ATH) above $126,000. The combined short and long derivatives flush hit the $19 billion mark alongside the volatility, which is the largest single-day liquidation squeeze in the sector’s history.

Below is a chart that shows all the liquidation events of 2025, putting into perspective just how big the October 10th round was.

In total, the nominal value of crypto liquidations exceeded the $150 billion mark in the year, implying an average of $400 to $500 million liquidations occurred every day.

Many of these liquidation events had limited impact on the market structure, however, as the report explained:

On the vast majority of trading days, the scale of long/short liquidations remained within the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily reflecting daily margin adjustments and the clearing of short-term positions in a high-leverage environment.

Naturally, among the events that did have effects beyond the short-term, the clearest example was the October 10th deleveraging. The actual scale of this event may have been even larger than $19 billion, as CoinGlass noted:

When factoring in the disclosure timing of certain platforms and feedback from market makers, the actual nominal liquidation scale likely approached $30–40 billion, representing a multiple of the second-highest event in the previous cycle.

Longs were the party affected the most by the derivatives squeeze, with approximately 85% to 90% of the positions involved in the event being bullish crypto bets.

The derivatives trading volume on the centralized exchanges also responded to the volatility, assuming a value significantly above the average.

From the above chart, it’s visible that the crypto derivatives volume surged to $748.3 billion alongside the October 10th deleveraging, nearly three times the average of $264.5 billion for the year.

Unlike the liquidation map, though, where October 10th stands out as the clear spike, there were other big spikes in the volume throughout 2025 that broke above the average (represented by the dashed orange line). “This reflects that during phases of market acceleration, derivatives have become the core battlefield for price discovery and Leveraged speculation,” said the report.

In total, 2025 saw a whopping $85.70 trillion in crypto derivatives trading volume.

Bitcoin Price

At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading around $88,200, up over 2% in the last week.