{"id":10655,"date":"2026-03-21T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T06:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/over-half-a-billion-dollars-wiped-out-as-bitcoin-locks-in-at-70000\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T06:00:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T06:00:26","slug":"over-half-a-billion-dollars-wiped-out-as-bitcoin-locks-in-at-70000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/over-half-a-billion-dollars-wiped-out-as-bitcoin-locks-in-at-70000\/","title":{"rendered":"Over Half A Billion Dollars Wiped Out As Bitcoin Locks In At $70,000"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whale wallets quietly shifted to buying mode over the past two weeks \u2014 even as the broader crypto market absorbed one of its worst single-day liquidation events in recent memory.<\/p>\n

A Massive Options Expiry Freezes The Price<\/h2>\n

Friday’s settlement of Deribit’s March options contracts has effectively put Bitcoin<\/a> on hold. The expiry involves 24,838 contracts with a combined notional value of $1.72 billion, and BTC has landed squarely at the $70,000 strike \u2014 the exact level known as “max pain,” where the greatest number of options contracts expire worthless.<\/p>\n

That pins price in a tight band. Traders expect it to hold between $69,000 and $71,000 until contracts settle later today.<\/p>\n

Max pain<\/a> is not a coincidence. It describes the point where option sellers \u2014 typically institutional market makers \u2014 collect maximum losses from buyers.<\/p>\n

When open interest is concentrated enough, the market tends to drift toward that level as expiry approaches, and that appears to be exactly what happened this week.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin fell about 1.4% from midnight Thursday, landing at $70,000 by the time derivatives traders were watching closely.<\/p>\n

Longs Got Crushed While Shorts Walked Away<\/h2>\n

The damage across the broader market was severe. Data shows 141,810 traders were liquidated over a 24-hour stretch, with total losses reaching $541 million.<\/p>\n

Long positions \u2014 bets that prices would rise \u2014 accounted for $443 million of that, or roughly 80% of the total. Short sellers, by contrast, lost only $97 million.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bitcoin led the wreckage at $191 million in liquidations. Ether followed at $165 million. The single largest loss was a $18 million ETH\/USDT position on the Aster exchange, wiped out in one move.<\/p>\n


\nOpen Interest, Futures Down<\/p>\n

The time breakdown tells the story clearly. The one-hour window showed relatively balanced liquidations at $18 million. But zoom out to four hours and the figure jumps to $126 million \u2014 and over 12 hours, it hit $300 million, almost entirely from leveraged buyers who got caught on the wrong side.<\/p>\n

Futures open interest industry-wide fell<\/a> 5.6% to close to $107 billion. Ether futures dropped 9% alongside a 6% decline in spot price, a combination that points to capital leaving the market outright, not just prices falling.<\/p>\n

Funding rates for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and BNB have all turned negative, a sign that short positions are back in demand across the board.<\/p>\n

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whale wallets quietly shifted to buying mode over the past two weeks \u2014 even as the broader crypto market absorbed one of its worst single-day liquidation events in recent memory. A Massive Options Expiry Freezes The Price Friday’s settlement of Deribit’s March options contracts has effectively put Bitcoin on hold. The expiry involves 24,838 contracts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[245],"tags":[22,28,32,35,51,4768,530],"class_list":["post-10655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bitcoin-news","tag-bitcoin","tag-bitcoin-news","tag-btc","tag-btcusd","tag-crypto","tag-max-pain","tag-open-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ad-doge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}