Bitcoin 5% flash crash leads to $165M in leveraged crypto liquidations

Leverage traders are nursing losses of over $165 million as the price of Bitcoin tumbled 5%.

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 2 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 (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 with a net inflow of $165.9 million, while Fidelity came in second with $44 million.

Related: Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle

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 U.S. Dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT) also wobbled around 1%, briefly falling from its $1 peg to $0.988, according to data from CoinGecko and Google Finance.

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.