A sudden 5% drawdown in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) on Tuesday has seen traders with leveraged exposure to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rack up over $165 million in losses in less than two hours.
Bitcoin plunged 5% from $69,450 to as low as $65,970 in less than 30 minutes in early hours on March 2 UTC, per TradingView data.
According to data from Coinglass, Bitcoin’s sharp wick down saw more than $165 million in leveraged positions wiped out, with just over $50 million in Bitcoin longs and more than $40 million in Ether (ETH) longs accounting for the bulk of that figure.
Roughly $6 million in long positions on Dogecoin (DOGE) and $4 million in Solana’s SOL (SOL) were liquidated, trailing BTC and ETH.
Around the same time as the drawdown, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) posted a net outflow of $86 million, breaking a four-day positive inflow streak, per FarSide data.
BlackRock’s ETF stood as the best-performing fund, whose net inflows reached $165.9 million, while Fidelity came in second with $44 million.
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However, the inflows were weighed down by Grayscale’s GBTC posting $302 million in outflows, bringing the net daily outflows for all the funds to $85.7 million.
Tether wobbles from its peg
At the same time as the Bitcoin flash crash, the value of the United States dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT) also wobbled around 1%, briefly falling from its $1 peg to $0.988, according to data from CoinGecko.
It’s unclear if the USDT wobble was an error in the API of certain data trackers or if the value of the currency suffered a sudden loss; however, the brief depeg did not appear on other price trackers.
Cointelegraph contacted Tether but did not receive an immediate response.
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