Bitcoin Price Tanks as Nearly $300 Million in Longs Get Rekt

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other top cryptocurrencies plunged in price suddenly Friday afternoon, yielding a still-growing pile of liquidations that includes almost $300 million worth of long positions.

Some $285 million worth of crypto long positions have been liquidated across the board in the last hour alone, per data from CoinGlass, along with $12 million in short positions. Expanded out daily, there’s $399 million worth of long position liquidations over the past 24 hours, plus $47 million in shorts.

Bitcoin dipped from a price above $71,000 to under $69,000 in a matter of about 40 minutes, while Ethereum plunged from $3,800 to under $3,650. Both coins are starting to rebound.

Earlier in the day, the crypto market had shrugged off hotter-than-expected jobs data from the U.S. Labor Department.

“Hard assets are suffering due to the potential impact of Fed rates being ‘higher for longer,'” Amberdata’s Director of Derivatives Greg Magadini told Decrypt, pointing to Friday’s labor figures.

He added that after the approval of spot Ethereum ETFs, there was a notable increase in open interest for Ethereum futures. That could push prices further down as leverage is unwound, Magadini stated, if there’s no “follow-through” with Ethereum prices to meet longs positioned to the upside.

Among cryptocurrencies, meme coins posted outsized losses Friday. The Solana-based BONK had fallen 9% over the past hour to $0.00002745, showing a 16.7% decrease in price over the past day. Dogwifhat and the Ethereum-based Pepe had each fallen 13% during that same span.

Meanwhile, major Wall Street stock indexes were comparatively less turbulent. The S&P 500 had edged up 0.07% midday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite had fallen slightly.

The jolt to Bitcoin’s price pushed the asset below $70,000, crossing a psychological threshold that it had overcome earlier this week. In March, the price of Bitcoin set a new all-time high above $73,700, pushed to new heights not long after the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Though losses in the crypto market were widespread on Friday afternoon, there were pockets of green. The Bitcoin-based BRC-20 token ORDI had increased 1.7% over the past day, while the decentralized storage protocol Filecoin’s native token had increased around 1% to $6.03.

Editor’s note: This story is was updated after publication with additional detail.