Over the past two years, BitMEX, a prominent Bitcoin derivatives platform, has gained much traction within the cryptocurrency trading community; in 2017, most BTC traders kept to trading on spot exchanges, meaning without leverage, though the tides have changed in the past two years as investors seek more profits.<\/p>\n
This search for profit, however, has seemingly come at a cost, with reports indicating that BitMEX traders saw billions nominally liquidated whilst they were trading Bitcoin.<\/p>\n
Bitcoin saw its fair share of volatility in 2019, that’s for sure. Case in point: at the end of October, when BTC had entered the $7,000s for the first time in months, the price of the cryptocurrency suddenly jumped<\/a> 40%, rallying from $7,300 to as high as $10,600 in under 24 hours. Literally.<\/p>\n Due to the nature of the aforementioned moves, of which there were many in 2019, hundreds of millions worth of BitMEX positions \u2014 both long and short positions \u2014 have been liquidated.<\/p>\n In fact, cryptocurrency news channel Unfolded recently noted that per data from Skew.com and Datamish.com, $19.6 billion worth of Bitcoin positions on the platform were liquidated over the 12 months of 2019 (not counting the past few days and the days coming up). What’s interesting is that a majority of the liquidations (like 90% of the liquidations) were of long positions, meaning that investors were largely skewed long.<\/p>\n Through the course of the year, ~$20 billion got liquidated on @BitMEXdotcom<\/a>, a ~20% increase since last year.<\/p>\n Assuming an average leverage of 25x: <\/p>\n ~$800 million of user funds got liquidation on BitMEX during 2019.<\/p>\n data: https:\/\/t.co\/sIhSHD2UPJ<\/a> | https:\/\/t.co\/KBWo3n0CTo<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/OVJ1z4W2g2<\/a><\/p>\n — unfolded. (@cryptounfolded) December 29, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n