What a liquidation is
When you trade futures with leverage, you put up margin: a deposit that covers losses on a position much larger than the deposit itself. If the market moves against you far enough that the margin left in the position falls below the exchange's maintenance margin, the exchange closes the position for you. That forced close is a liquidation.
The price at which this happens is the liquidation price. The higher the leverage, the closer it sits to your entry: at 10× a move of a little under 10% against you wipes out the margin, at 50× it takes about 2%. Exchanges liquidate a little before the margin reaches zero, and the fee they charge for doing so is one reason the loss is often larger than traders expect.
How is a liquidation calculated?
The exchange force-closes a position when its equity (margin plus unrealised profit or loss) falls to the maintenance margin. With isolated margin only that position's margin counts; with cross margin the whole account balance does, so the liquidation price sits further away.
For an isolated long the liquidation price is the entry price × (1 − 1/leverage) ÷ (1 − maintenance margin rate). A short mirrors it: entry × (1 + 1/leverage) ÷ (1 + rate). Fees and funding paid pull it closer. The leverage guide walks through the formula, and the liquidation price calculator lets you try your own entry, leverage and exchange.
Worked example (illustrative, default maintenance margin of 0.50%): a 10× isolated long on BTC opened at the current Binance perp price of $72,684.00 is liquidated at about $65,744.32, 9.55% below the entry, before fees and funding.
Long and short liquidations
- A long liquidation happens when price falls. The exchange has to sell to close the long, which adds selling pressure.
- A short liquidation happens when price rises. The exchange has to buy to close the short, which adds buying pressure.
Liquidation data is labelled by the position that was closed. "$50M of longs liquidated" means long positions were force-sold, usually during a drop. Some feeds instead label the side of the closing order (a sell for a long); this site always uses the position side.
Cascades
Read what is a liquidation cascade? for the leverage setup, busiest-hour concentration and observed aftermath.
Liquidations feed on themselves. Forced selling from one wave of long liquidations pushes price lower, which reaches the liquidation prices of the next group of longs, whose forced selling pushes price lower again. The same happens upward for shorts, where it is called a short squeeze. This is why crypto has sudden wicks: minutes of one-way liquidations, then a quick bounce once the leverage is gone.
Cascades are most likely when a lot of leverage is on one side. Rising open interest with extreme funding is the classic setup. After a large cascade, open interest usually drops sharply, because the liquidated positions no longer exist.
Where the numbers come from, and why they undercount
Exchanges publish liquidations through public websocket streams, but not all of them publish every one:
- Binance liquidations are sampled: for each symbol, only the latest liquidation order within each 1,000 ms is sent. If ten positions are liquidated on BTCUSDT in the same second, the public stream shows one of them.
- Bybit's all-liquidation stream pushes every liquidation, batched every 500 ms.
- Bitget liquidations are sampled: only the largest per coin and side each second is published. Coin-margined perps are not listed.
- Gate publishes every liquidation order on USDT perps, batched each second. USD notional uses the pushed order limit price and can differ from the eventual average-fill notional. BTC-settled inverse perps are not covered.
- HTX publishes every liquidation on USDT swaps; coin-margined swaps are not covered.
- Aster liquidations are sampled, at most one per symbol per second, on crypto perps (stocks excluded).
- Lighter publishes every liquidation on crypto perps as liquidation fills on the public trade stream.
- MEXC and KuCoin publish no liquidation feed.
- Hyperliquid has no public liquidation stream covering all markets. The separate Hyperliquid probable-liquidations feed shows probable liquidations of tracked wallets, inferred from wallet snapshots rather than exchange-reported. These are kept out of the liquidation totals.
The liquidations page marks each exchange's coverage. The practical rule: every public liquidation total, here or anywhere else, is a floor. It is good for comparing one hour with another, or longs with shorts, and less good as an absolute count of money lost.
How traders use liquidation data
Spotting capitulation. A spike in long liquidations near the bottom of a sharp drop often marks forced sellers running out. It is not a guarantee: a second leg can liquidate a new group.
Reading the move. If a rally comes with heavy short liquidations and falling open interest, it is mostly shorts being forced out rather than new buyers arriving. That kind of move can fade once the squeeze is done.
Comparing sides. The split between long and short liquidations over 24 hours shows which side the market punished. The live box above shows that split, the total for BTC and the single largest order.
Per coin. Large liquidations on a small coin say more than the same dollar amount on BTC. The BTC liquidations page and every coin's liquidations tab show long vs short totals for 1h, 4h and 24h and a live feed.
Avoiding being the liquidation
Lower leverage moves the liquidation price further away. Isolated margin limits a liquidation to the margin in that one position, while cross margin can use your whole balance to hold it open, which delays liquidation but puts more at risk. Watch funding too: it is paid from margin, and at high leverage a few expensive intervals can pull the liquidation price closer. None of this is advice; it is how the exchanges' margin rules work.
Checked against the exchanges' own documentation on 21 October 2026: Binance API: all market liquidation order streams · Bybit API: all liquidation stream. Not financial advice.