Long Crypto Traders See $190M in Losses as Bitcoin Retreats After Apparent Mt.Gox Repayments

High funding rates, relatively low liquidity and reports of crypto exchange Mt.Gox starting repayments to victims of its 2014 hack spurred a market-wide decline in the past 24 hours, bringing losses to leveraged bullish traders.

In futures market, traders betting on higher prices lost over $190 million to liquidations as bitcoin BTC$87,288.87 dropped as much as 4% before recovering in Wednesday morning hours. Some $45 million of those stemmed from altcoin-tracked futures in an unusual move – with bitcoin liquidations accounting for a relatively lesser $36 million in losses.

Traders of Solana’s SOL tokens took on nearly $20 million in losses, while those of Bitcoin protocol Ordinals (ORDI) lost $8 million, data from Coinglass shows. Crypto exchange Binance saw over $97 million in liquidations, the most among counterparties.

The aforementioned liquidation figures are highest in recent weeks after a nearly $500 million flush-out in early December.

Liquidations occur when an exchange forcefully closes a trader’s leveraged position owing to a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial margin. It happens when a trader cannot meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position, that is when they don't have sufficient funds to keep the trade open.

The drop came as the Mt. Gox crypto exchange appeared to be starting to repay customers who lost 850,000 bitcoin BTC$87,288.87, now valued at around $36 billion, on Tuesday. Some participants in the mtgoxinsolvency subreddit group said they had received payouts in yen over Paypal. Others, who’d chosen to receive cash into bank accounts, said they had not seen any inflows.