How crypto derivatives liquidation drove Bitcoin’s 2025 crash

Forced liquidations in the crypto derivatives market reached about $150 billion in 2025, according to CoinGlass data.

On its face, the figure looks like a year of persistent crisis. For many retail traders, watching price feeds turn red became shorthand for chaos. In practice, it captured something more mundane and structural: the notional value of futures and perpetual positions that exchanges forcibly closed when margin fell short.

Most of the time, that flow was more of a maintenance function than a crash. In a market where derivatives rather than spot markets set the marginal price, liquidations operated like a recurring levy on leverage.

Taken in isolation, the number looked alarming. However, set against the backdrop of 2025’s derivatives machine, it did not.

The aggregate crypto derivatives turnover reached roughly $85.7 trillion for the year, or about $264.5 billion a day.

In that context, the liquidation tally represented the byproduct of a market in which perpetual swaps and basis trades were the dominant instruments, and where price discovery was tightly coupled to margin engines and liquidation algorithms.

So, as crypto derivatives volumes climbed, the market’s open interest steadily rebuilt from the depressed levels that followed the 2022–2023 deleveraging cycle.

By Oct. 7, notional open interest across major venues had reached about $235.9 billion. Bitcoin had traded as high as roughly $126,000 earlier in the year.

The spread between spot and futures prices supported a thick layer of basis trades and carry structures that relied on stable funding and orderly market behavior.

Essentially, the stress that mattered was not evenly spread. It was driven by a combination of record open interest, crowded positioning, and the growing share of leverage in mid-cap and long-tail markets.

The structure worked until a macro shock hit, when margin thresholds were tightly clustered, and risk was pointing in the same direction.

The macro shock that broke the pattern

The breakpoint for the crypto derivatives market did not come from within the emerging industry. Instead, the catalyst was driven by the policies of the world’s largest countries.

On Oct. 10, President Donald Trump announced 100% tariffs on imports from China and signaled additional export controls on critical software.

The statement pushed global risk assets into a sharp risk-off move. In equities and credit, the adjustment showed up as widening spreads and lower prices. In crypto, it collided with a market that was long, levered, and sitting on record derivatives exposure.

The first move was straightforward: spot prices fell as traders marked down risk.

However, in a market where perpetual futures and leveraged swaps dictate the marginal tick, that spot move was enough to push a large block of long positions across their maintenance margin lines.

So, exchanges began liquidating under-margined accounts into order books that were already thinning as liquidity providers pulled back.

As a result, the forced liquidations across the market totaled more than $19 billion between Oct. 10 and 11.

The majority were on the long side, with estimates suggesting 85% to 90% of the wiped-out positions were bullish bets. The skew confirmed what positioning data had been flagging for weeks: a one-sided market leaning on the same direction of trade and the same set of instruments.

The liquidation wave followed the standard path at first. Accounts that breached margin thresholds were tagged for closure. Positions were sold at or near market prices, draining bids and pushing prices into the next stop layer.

Open interest fell by more than $70 billion in a matter of days, dropping from the early-October peak toward roughly $145.1 billion by year-end.

Even after the crash, that end-of-year figure remained above the 2025 starting point, underscoring the leverage that had accumulated before the event.

What made October different from the daily churn was not the existence of liquidations, but their concentration and the way product features interacted with depleted liquidity. Funding conditions tightened, volatility spiked, and hedging assumptions that had held for most of the year broke down in a matter of hours.

When safeguards turn into amplifiers

The most important shift in that window occurred in mechanisms that are usually invisible: the backstop exchanges deploy when standard liquidation logic runs out of road.

Under normal conditions, liquidations are handled by selling down positions at a bankruptcy price and using insurance funds to absorb any residual losses.

Auto-deleveraging (ADL) serves as a contingency behind that process. When losses threaten to exceed what insurance funds and fees can cover, ADL reduces exposure on profitable opposing accounts to protect the venue’s balance sheet.

From Oct. 10 to 11, that safeguard moved to center stage.

As order books in some contracts thinned and insurance buffers came under stress, ADL began to trigger more frequently, especially in less liquid markets. Profitable shorts and market makers saw their positions cut according to pre-set priority queues, often at prices that diverged from where they would have chosen to trade.

For firms running market-neutral or inventory-hedging strategies, the impact was acute. A short futures leg intended to offset spot or altcoin exposure was partially or fully closed by the venue, turning an intended hedge into realized P&L and leaving residual risk unprotected.

In some cases, accounts were forced to reduce winning positions in Bitcoin futures while remaining long in thin altcoin perps that continued to slide.

The heaviest distortions showed up in those long-tail markets. While Bitcoin and Ethereum drew down by 10% to 15% during the window, many smaller tokens saw their perpetual contracts fall by 50% to 80% from recent levels.

In markets with limited depth, forced selling and ADL hit order books that were not built to absorb such a large flow. Prices gapped lower as bids disappeared, and the mark prices that feed into margin calculations adjusted accordingly, pulling more accounts into liquidation.

The result was a loop. Liquidations pushed prices lower, which widened the gap between index prices and the levels at which ADL events were executed. Market makers that might have stepped in at narrower spreads now faced uncertain hedge execution and the prospect of involuntary reductions.

Due to this, many cut back on quoting size or moved wider, further reducing visible liquidity and leaving liquidation engines to work with thinner books.

The episode highlighted a critical point for a market where derivatives define the tape: safeguards that contain risk in ordinary conditions can amplify it when too much leverage is stacked in the same direction and in the same venues.

The crash was not simply “too much speculation.” It was the interaction of product design, margin logic, and infrastructure limits under stress.

Concentrated venues, narrow corridors

Venue concentration shaped the market outcome as much as leverage and product mechanics.

This year, crypto derivatives liquidity has clustered around a small group of large platforms.

For context, Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, processed about $25.09 trillion in notional volume for the year, capturing close to 30% of the market.

Three others, including OKX, Bybit, and Bitget, followed with $10.76 trillion, $9.43 trillion, and $8.17 trillion in turnover, respectively.

Together, the top four accounted for roughly 62% of global derivatives trading.

On most days, that concentration simplified execution. It put depth in a handful of order books and allowed large traders to move risk with predictable slippage. In a tail event, it meant that a relatively small number of venues and risk engines were responsible for the bulk of liquidations.

During the October break, those venues de-risked in sync. Similar books of client positions, similar margin triggers, and similar liquidation logic produced simultaneous waves of forced selling.

The infrastructure that connects these platforms—on-chain bridges, internal transfer systems, fiat rails—came under strain as traders tried to move collateral and rebalance positions.

As a result, withdrawals and inter-exchange transfers slowed, narrowing the corridors firms rely on to arbitrage price gaps and maintain hedges.

When capital cannot move quickly across venues, cross-exchange strategies fail mechanically. A trader short on one exchange and long on another may see one leg forcibly reduced by ADL while being unable to top up margin or shift collateral in time to protect the other side. Spreads widen as arbitrage capital retreats.

Lessons for the crypto derivatives market

The October episode condensed all of these dynamics into a two-day stress test. Roughly $150 billion in liquidations over the full year now reads less as a measure of chaos and more as a record of how a derivatives-dominated market clears risk.

Most of the time, that clearance was orderly and absorbed by insurance funds and routine liquidations.

In the October window, it exposed the limits of a structure that depends heavily on a few large venues, high leverage in mid-cap and long-tail assets, and backstops that can reverse roles under pressure.

Unlike prior crises that centered on credit failures and institutional insolvencies, the 2025 event did not trigger a visible chain of defaults. The system reduced open interest, repriced risk, and continued operating.

The cost was borne in concentrated P&L hits, sharp dispersion between large-cap and long-tail assets, and a clearer view of how much of the market’s behavior is dictated by plumbing rather than narrative.

For traders, exchanges, and regulators, the lesson was direct. In a market where derivatives set the price, the “liquidation tax” is not just an occasional penalty on over-leverage. It is a structural feature, and under hostile macro conditions, it can shift from routine cleanup to the engine of a crash.