The surface looked calm. Bitcoin ended the 24-hour window around $63,900 — almost exactly where it started. Ether traded at $1,900. But underneath those flat prices, the Federal Reserve's rate decision had triggered enough volatility to wipe out $286 million in leveraged crypto positions across more than 87,000 traders.
The carnage had an unusual characteristic: it was remarkably balanced. Longs accounted for $186 million of the damage and shorts for $100 million — the signature of a market that moved hard in both directions before settling back where it began. Bitcoin's liquidations were almost perfectly split, with around $28 million in longs cleared against $29 million in shorts, even as the price only swung between $63,247 and $64,660, a range of barely 2%.
Ether and Equity Perpetuals Take the Worst of It
Ether recorded the largest total liquidations of any single asset at approximately $58 million, tilted toward the long side, as prices ranged between $1,850 and $1,920. The bulk of the damage — $188 million — landed in the immediate window around Wednesday's Fed announcement, with longs alone accounting for $130 million of that wave.
The single largest individual liquidation was a $2.9 million bitcoin position on Binance.
Beyond crypto, equity perpetuals listed on crypto exchanges suffered heavily. Around $19 million in SanDisk positions were liquidated, along with $10 million in Micron, $7 million in SK Hynix, and $7 million in SOXL, a leveraged semiconductor ETF. These are perpetual futures on stocks and funds that trade on crypto exchanges with the same leverage mechanics as bitcoin itself.
Almost all of the equity perpetual losses fell on the long side. Micron's liquidations split roughly seven to one in favor of longs — $9 million against $1 million. Traders had been using crypto rails to bet on the AI memory trade continuing higher, and they were positioned that way heading into the sharpest chip selloff of the year.
A Volatile Week for Chip-Linked Bets
The timing proved costly. SK Hynix fell 17% on Wednesday after reporting profit up 557% — a result that beat historical norms by miles but fell short of elevated investor expectations. Korea's Kospi index has now dropped more than 40% from its June peak. The chip selloff had already rattled crypto markets earlier in the week, and the Fed meeting amplified the damage for traders caught on the wrong side of both moves.
It was also the second consecutive incident involving equity perpetuals on crypto exchanges causing significant losses. Earlier in the week, a single pre-market trade on a thin Korean venue dropped Trade.xyz's SK Hynix contract by 19%, triggering $60 million in liquidations that the exchange has since agreed to cover in full.
