Bitcoin price slips to $93K as liquidations soar and long-term BTC holders take profit

Proof of the liquidations-driven sell-off can be seen in the chart below depicting volume-by-side data for major centralized exchanges and showing heavy selling at exchanges offering perpetual futures trading.

Looking beyond the forced selling of margin longs (liquidations), Glassnode identified Bitcoin long-term holders (LTHs) as another culprit behind the current selling. The analysts pinpointed the 6-month to 12-month LTH cohort as the primary seller “when an average cost basis 71% lower than the market price ( ~$57.9K).”

Financial markets are always a delicate balance between buyers and sellers and today’s price action saw the bias shift from the shorter-term sentiment being spot and leveraged long to short. As liquidations ramped up and Bitcoin price dropped closer to $90,000, a surge in short positions opened, and BTC’s funding rate climbed from 0.019 to a peak at 0.04.

Liquidation map data now suggest that a Bitcoin price drop below $94,000 will kick off the next wave of forced selling to $90,000, a level which some traders have suggested they would be happy to bid.