‘A Lot More Than $2B’: Bybit CEO Shares ‘Real’ Crypto Market Liquidation Estimate

Over the weekend, the crypto market experienced its largest correction in months, reportedly fueled by the new US tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. The market closed the first two days of February in red, with a 21% retrace from Friday’s highs.

The news also ignited a massive leverage liquidation worth billions of dollars. Despite the initial estimates suggesting a lower number, Bybit’s CEO revealed that the total market’s crypto liquidation could be significantly higher than the $2 billion reported.

Crypto Market Sees 21% Weekend Retrace

As February began, US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on his three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico, and China. According to the report, Trump is implementing an additional 25% tariff on imports from the two neighboring countries, and 10% on China’s imports.

After the news, the crypto market started to freefall from its Friday highs, with Bitcoin (BTC) falling 12.5% over the weekend to $91,000. The rest of the market followed BTC’s lead, with the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum (ETH), dropping over 35% to $2,100, its lowest price since September.

As the fear of a global tariff war increased, most altcoins fell to monthly lows, momentarily retracing to their pre-December breakout range. As a result, the total crypto market capitalization plunged 21% over the weekend, its largest correction since August 2024’s “Red Monday.”

A recent report from Nansen noted that the crypto market seems to be “satiated with good news for now,” making it more “reactive to negative sentiment than positive news,” as seen with last week’s DeepSeek-triggered correction.

The weekend market crash also prompted massive leverage liquidations, with initial reports estimating over $2 billion. The record number represents a larger single-day crash than the COVID-19 and FTX collapse.

CoinGlass data shows that “In the past 24 hours, 743,002 traders were liquidated, the total liquidations come in at $2.30 billion,” with Ethereum’s $637 million liquidations taking the lead.

Liquidations Higher Than Expected

On Monday morning, Bytbit’s co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou shared some insight on the total value of the recent crypto liquidations. In an X post, Zhou stated that the “real” total number is “a lot more than $2 billion.”

According to his estimation, Bybit’s 24-hour liquidation was around $2.1 billion, a 530% increase from the $333 million recorded in CoinGlass. Zhou explained that due to limitations in the application programming interfaces (API), CoinGlass didn’t register all the liquidations.

FYI, Bybit 24hr liquidation alone was $2.1B, As you can see in below screenshot, Bybit 24hr liquidations recorded on Coinglass was around $333m, however, this is not all of the liquidations. We have api limitation on how much feeds are pushed out per second.

The crypto exchange’s CEO considers that other exchanges are likely experiencing the same limited liquidation data, which would potentially increase the total value from the $2.3 billion recorded anywhere between $8 billion to $10 billion.

Based on this limit, some users asked about the potential discrepancy between the real liquidation value from the FTX collapse. Zhou detailed that he estimates this figure to be “at least 4-6 times of what was reported basically.”

Ultimately, he pledged to be more transparent in the future, promising that “Moving forward, Bybit will start to PUSH all liquidation data.”