Bitcoin Price Plunges to $60,000 as Crypto Liquidations Top $300 Million

The price of Bitcoin plunged to nearly $60,000 per coin on Tuesday afternoon, prompting liquidations for the positions of those betting on the price of the asset to go up.

CoinGlass data shows that in the past 24 hours, over $261 million in long positions for all cryptocurrencies have been liquidated. Including short positions, total liquidations stand at over $324 million.

In the past four hours alone, the figure stands at nearly $70 million—$24.4 million of which were positions in Bitcoin.

Currently, the price of Bitcoin sits at $60,309 per data from CoinGecko, though crypto exchange Coinbase shows that it dipped as low as $60,012 not long ago. Ethereum, meanwhile, is down to $2,985 as of this writing, down 6% over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin's daily dip stands at just under 4% as of this writing.

In the world of derivatives, long positions are held by traders who put cash on betting that the price of an asset will go up in the future.

Bitcoin in March hit a new all-time high of nearly $74,000, according to CoinGecko data. It's previous all-time high set in 2021 was $69,044.

Part of the reason for the rise in price was that new investors could get exposure to the asset via spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January.

But signs that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates higher for longer, along with geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East, are scaring investors away from risk assets like cryptocurrencies.

The new spot Bitcoin ETFs are also not as hot as they were following their launch and investors have been cashing out of the vehicles, helping push the price of the biggest digital coin down further.

Edited by Andrew Hayward