Bitcoin Tops $83,000 as Shorts Lead 24-Hour Liquidations

Bitcoin (BTC) traded above $83,000 on Oct. 20, while a 24-hour market snapshot counted $46.6 million in short liquidations, showing the scale of leveraged positions closed.

At 3 p.m. ET (19:00 UTC), the Bitcoin tally also showed $30.6 million in long liquidations. The figures measure the value of positions forcibly closed, rather than traders’ net losses. They do not establish what drove Bitcoin’s price move.

An earlier one-hour tally across three exchanges showed the opposite split for the broader crypto market. From 10:17 to 11:17 a.m. ET (14:17 to 15:17 UTC), long liquidations totaled $28.48 million and shorts $8.76 million across Binance, Bybit and OKX. Bitcoin accounted for $8.01 million of the $37.24 million total. The one-hour figures cover multiple assets and a different period from the later Bitcoin-only snapshot.

U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds drew $526.7 million on Oct. 19, following $228.4 million in net outflows from Oct. 12-16. The fund flows measure a different kind of market activity from forced closures of leveraged trades.

Futures open interest measured in BTC across 22 exchanges rose 4.3%, from 619,645 BTC on Oct. 12 to 646,442 BTC by Oct. 15, while Bitcoin fell to $79,821. The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to meet Oct. 27-28.