{"id":143740,"date":"2026-03-21T00:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T00:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=143740"},"modified":"2026-03-21T00:00:34","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T00:00:34","slug":"over-half-a-billion-dollars-wiped-out-as-bitcoin-locks-in-at-70000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=143740","title":{"rendered":"Over Half A Billion Dollars Wiped Out As Bitcoin Locks In At $70,000"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whale wallets quietly shifted to buying mode over the past two weeks \u2014 even as the broader crypto market absorbed one of its worst single-day liquidation events in recent memory.<\/p>\n

A Massive Options Expiry Freezes The Price<\/h2>\n

Friday\u2019s settlement of Deribit\u2019s March options contracts has effectively put Bitcoin<\/a> on hold. The expiry involves 24,838 contracts with a combined notional value of $1.72 billion, and BTC has landed squarely at the $70,000 strike \u2014 the exact level known as \u201cmax pain,\u201d where the greatest number of options contracts expire worthless.<\/p>\n

That pins price in a tight band. Traders expect it to hold between $69,000 and $71,000 until contracts settle later today.<\/p>\n

Max pain<\/a> is not a coincidence. It describes the point where option sellers \u2014 typically institutional market makers \u2014 collect maximum losses from buyers.<\/p>\n

When open interest is concentrated enough, the market tends to drift toward that level as expiry approaches, and that appears to be exactly what happened this week.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin fell about 1.4% from midnight Thursday, landing at $70,000 by the time derivatives traders were watching closely.<\/p>\n

Longs Got Crushed While Shorts Walked Away<\/h2>\n

The damage across the broader market was severe. Data shows 141,810 traders were liquidated over a 24-hour stretch, with total losses reaching $541 million.<\/p>\n

Long positions \u2014 bets that prices would rise \u2014 accounted for $443 million of that, or roughly 80% of the total. Short sellers, by contrast, lost only $97 million.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin led the wreckage at $191 million in liquidations. Ether followed at $165 million. The single largest loss was a $18 million ETH\/USDT position on the Aster exchange, wiped out in one move.<\/p>\n

Open Interest, Futures Down<\/p>\n

The time breakdown tells the story clearly. The one-hour window showed relatively balanced liquidations at $18 million. But zoom out to four hours and the figure jumps to $126 million \u2014 and over 12 hours, it hit $300 million, almost entirely from leveraged buyers who got caught on the wrong side.<\/p>\n

Futures open interest industry-wide fell<\/a> 5.6% to close to $107 billion. Ether futures dropped 9% alongside a 6% decline in spot price, a combination that points to capital leaving the market outright, not just prices falling.<\/p>\n

Funding rates for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and BNB have all turned negative, a sign that short positions are back in demand across the board.<\/p>\n

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whale wallets quietly shifted to buying mode over the past two weeks \u2014 even as the broader crypto market absorbed one of its worst single-day liquidation events in recent memory. A Massive Options Expiry Freezes The Price Friday\u2019s settlement of Deribit\u2019s March options contracts has effectively put Bitcoin on hold. The expiry involves 24,838 contracts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":143741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143740"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/143741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}