It would seem that Bitcoin’s rally earlier this week was short-lived. The top cryptocurrency has again descended below $30,000, liquidating over half a billion dollars in leverage trades during the fall.
According to BitStamp data, Bitcoin’s price held steady at about $31,781 until approximately 14:00 UTC on Wednesday.
Over the next three hours, the price rapidly fell to $29,967, but quickly recovered back above $30,000, temporarily halting its descent.
However, the price buckled from its support at about 20:25, rapidly falling to $29,366 within just 5 minutes. It has since rebounded slightly, up to $29,657 at the time of writing.
Its collapse left long traders across the crypto market in shambles. Data from CoinGlass shows that over $88 million has been liquidated in the past hour and $587 million over the past day.
A majority of the liquidations – $350 million worth – occurred on Bitcoin trades, with relatively smaller amounts cleared from altcoins.
Altcoins have performed worse than Bitcoin in the past 24 hours, with coins like Ethereum and Cardano down 8.44% and 9.57% respectively.
Meanwhile, Solana has collapsed a whopping 11.66%, possibly due to the over 7-hour network outage that validators are yet to resolve.
BitStamp indicates that Bitcoin closed its 9th negative weekly candle in a row on Monday. As is typical in bear markets, Bitcoin’s market dominance is growing relative to the altcoin space.
The last liquidation event of this size took place in mid-May when over $1.2 billion was cleared within a day as Bitcoin reached a record low below $26,000.
