Liquidations, live.

Understanding Crypto Liquidations

A liquidation occurs when a trader's leveraged position is forcefully closed by the exchange because their margin balance can no longer support the position's unrealized losses. When Bitcoin drops sharply, traders using high leverage on long positions see their margin evaporate. The exchange automatically closes their positions at market price, creating additional selling pressure — a cascade effect where liquidations cause further price drops, triggering more liquidations.

This tracker shows liquidation orders as OKX publishes them for 20 major USDT perpetuals: 24-hour totals, the long/short split, the largest single orders and a feed of recent orders, refreshed every minute with the venue's observation time shown. Binance, Bybit and Kraken publish no public order-level feed, so their liquidations are not included and market-wide totals run higher than this page.

How to Read Liquidation Data

A sudden spike in liquidation totals almost always means price moved fast through a zone where leveraged positions were stacked. When the wiped side is overwhelmingly longs, the market just punished late buyers who chased the move; when shorts dominate, a squeeze forced bearish traders to buy back — and that forced buying fuels the move further.

The long/short split works as a rough positioning read, not a rule. Heavy long liquidations after a drop point to trapped late longs and often precede short-term exhaustion, because forced selling burns itself out once the over-leveraged cohort is flushed. Clustered cascades frequently coincide with local extremes; a quiet stretch tells you only that this venue's leveraged positions were not being forced out — not that positioning is healthy elsewhere.

Two caveats. Totals differ between trackers because coverage differs: this page counts OKX's published orders for 20 assets, so any figure quoting the whole market will be larger, and OKX keeps only its most recent orders per contract, which the coverage note above the cards reports. And liquidation data is a timing tool, not a direction tool: read it alongside funding rates and open interest, never on its own.

How Traders Use Liquidation Data

Watch liquidation clusters — Where many positions were liquidated near one price, traders treat that level as a zone to watch: a move back into it can trigger the remaining orders. That is an observation about past forced closures; it does not make price gravitate toward the level, and outstanding liquidation levels are estimates, not this feed.

Read the long/short split with care — Longs dominating a flush means late buyers were forced out after a drop; shorts dominating means a squeeze. Lopsided splits sometimes precede a pause or a reversal, but no threshold reliably calls one.

Watch for cascade risk — A sudden rise in liquidation volume often means price entered a zone of stacked leverage. Some traders wait for it to settle before entering; others position for continuation. Either way it is context, not a signal on its own.

Time entries after flushes — Large liquidation events sometimes mark temporary bottoms or tops because the forced flow exhausts itself. Contrarian traders look for entries after a cascade settles, with the usual risk controls, since a flush can also be the start of a larger move.

Long vs Short Liquidations

Long liquidations occur when the price drops — traders who bet on increases are force-closed and the exchange sells their positions into the market, adding selling pressure. Short liquidations occur when the price rises — short sellers are force-closed and the exchange buys back their positions, adding buying pressure (a short squeeze). Venues liquidate in different ways: some close the whole position at once, others reduce it in steps, so one liquidated position can appear as several orders. The long/short split shows which side of this venue's book was carrying the most stretched leverage.

Liquidations by Exchange

Venues differ in maximum leverage (Binance allows up to 125x, Kraken caps at 50x), in how the liquidation price is calculated, in maintenance-margin tiers and in insurance funds. A leverage cap says nothing about the leverage traders actually choose, so it does not by itself make positions safer or a venue's liquidations fewer. This page counts OKX's published liquidation orders only; the other venues do not publish an order-level feed.

Related Tools & Guides