There have been more than 665 million liquidations in the cryptocurrency market in the last 24 hours as Bitcoin faces intense selling pressure and Mt Gox continues to take action to make payouts.
It fell 7.4% in the last 24 hours to $54,199 at press time. The price drop came after the defunct crypto exchange moved around $2.7 billion worth of bitcoins in preparation for payments to creditors due to begin earlier this month.
According to Coinglass, a total of 230,541 traders were liquidated in the last 24 hours, with a total of $665.8 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges.
The leading cryptocurrency among liquidations was Bitcoin, with more than $222.1 million liquidated in the last 24 hours. Of these Bitcoin liquidations, about $181.8 million were long positions.
Ether also saw significant liquidations, with $163.4 million liquidated, of which $143.3 million was long positions, the data showed. The price of Ether fell 10.57% in the last 24 hours to $2,890.
Crypto liquidation occurs when a trader's positions in the cryptocurrency market are forcibly closed due to significant losses or lack of sufficient margin to meet maintenance requirements.
On Thursday evening, Mt Gox transferred 47,228.7 BTC ($2.71 billion) to the wallet address, which soon sent back 2,702 BTC and transferred 44,527 BTC to another address, according to blockchain tracker Arkham. Hours later, another address associated with Mt Gox transferred 1,545 BTC ($85 million) to a hot wallet on Bitbank, Arkham data showed.
Peter Chang, head of research at Presto Research, said selling pressure could be stronger for BCH than BTC, "given that BCH doesn't have as strong an investor base as BTC, so Mt Gox lenders are likely to try cash out immediately as with any other distribution."
