Crypto traders were leaning long into the weekend when President Trump's warning to Iran sent prices crashing on Monday. By morning Singapore time, bitcoin was below $77,000, ether was down about 3%, and more than 100,000 trader accounts had been wiped out.
Bitcoin slid as much as 2.2% to $76,551 on Monday, the lowest price since May 1. The trigger was the same macro story that has been pushing risk assets around for weeks - the war between the US and Iran, and the question of where it goes next.
President Trump's warning to Tehran to "get moving, fast" sent the dollar up and risk assets down, with crypto selling off harder than stocks did. That's what crypto tends to do these days when investors get nervous.
Bitcoin broke through a key price floor near $77,800 on the way down. Once that gave way, the borrowed money in the system did what borrowed money always does in a sell-off.
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CoinGlass data showed about $657 million in liquidations over 24 hours, the dollar value of leveraged trades that got force-closed when prices moved the wrong way. Roughly $584 million of that came from long bets, meaning traders who were betting prices would keep rising.
About $550 million in those bullish positions were unwound in a single four-hour window early Monday in Singapore, with around 107,000 trader accounts taking hits in the process.
Ether dropped to about $2,114 while Solana also fell, and smaller coins took the worst of it - as they usually do when bitcoin breaks support.
Bitcoin futures positioning had been heavily long heading into Monday, with traders piling into long positions ahead of a possible run at $80,000. That setup meant any sharp move down was going to clean out a lot of accounts at once.
The next leg depends on Iran. If headlines cool off, the borrowed-money bets that just got flushed will probably come back fast, since sell-offs like this often clear the way for sharp rebounds.
If the war heats up instead, $77,000 stops being a floor and starts being a ceiling. Below that, traders are watching the lower $70,000 range for the next floor, and a break there would erase the year-to-date gains for many recent buyers.
The traders who lost $584 million on Monday were sure they knew which way it was going.
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