Over $660M in crypto positions were wiped out in a single 24-hour window after President Trump posted a stark warning to Iran on Truth Social, sending Bitcoin crashing from $82,000 to a multi-week low of $76,650.
The mechanism behind that number wasn’t panic selling from ordinary holders; it was over-leveraged long positions acting as a self-loading gun, with the geopolitical headline pulling the trigger.
If you’ve never used margin trading and you’re wondering how a social media post erases two-thirds of a billion dollars in minutes, you’re asking exactly the right question. Here’s how it works, why it keeps happening, and what it means for your approach to crypto safety.
$BTC has dropped below the $77,000 level.
The key support zone is $75,000 which might get retested next.
After that, a rally is expected especially because of a new CME gap around $79,200 level. pic.twitter.com/smg5oCPmHf
— Ted (@TedPillows) May 18, 2026
Why Did $677M Disappear So Fast With the Recent Bitcoin Crash Below $80,000?
Think of leverage like a mortgage, but for a trade. A bank lets you buy a $300,000 house with $30,000 down; you control a large asset with a fraction of its actual value. If the house drops 10% in price, you’ve lost your entire down payment. The bank doesn’t wait for things to get worse; it pushes for a sale to recover its money first.
That’s exactly how leverage works in crypto. Here is what that means in plain English: if you put $1,000 into a 10x leveraged long position on Bitcoin, you’re effectively controlling $10,000 worth of BTC. A 10% price drop doesn’t cost you $100; it wipes out your entire $1,000. The exchange closes your position automatically to protect itself. That forced closure is called a liquidation.
At 20x leverage, a 5% move against you ends your trade. At 50x, which some platforms allow, a 2% dip is enough. When Bitcoin fell roughly $5,000 from its $82,000 peak, traders with high leverage had no margin buffer to absorb the loss.
According to data from Coinglass, Binance and OKX recorded the highest liquidation volumes, pointing squarely at retail traders using 10x to 100x leverage who were hit the hardest. More than $610 million of the total $660M in liquidations hit within just one to two hours of Trump’s post.
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Why Over-Leveraged Longs Were the Fuel, Not Just the Victims
Here’s the part that surprises most beginners: the liquidations themselves made the Bitcoin crash worse. It wasn’t a one-way story in which the price fell, and traders lost money. The losing trades actively pushed the price lower.
When the first wave of leveraged longs hit their liquidation prices, exchanges automatically sold their Bitcoin, triggering large market sells that hit the order book instantly. That selling pressure knocked the price down a little further.
That incremental drop pushed the next band of leveraged positions below their liquidation threshold, triggering another wave of forced sells. Then another. The cascade is entirely algorithmic, no human emotion, no hesitation, just automatic execution, one layer triggering the next.
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Over the past 48 hours, Bitcoin fell from the $80K–$82K range to as low as ~$76.7K, triggering more than $600M in liquidations across the crypto market, mostly long positions.
Ethereum dropped below ~$2.2K while altcoins saw even… pic.twitter.com/65prGQKzkB
— Shibarium | SHIB.IO (@Shibizens) May 18, 2026
This is why geopolitical headlines and crypto volatility are such a dangerous combination. The news provides the spark, but the accumulated market leverage is the fuel. In the weeks before this event, funding rates on major exchanges had turned significantly positive, a signal that the market was overheated with traders betting on further upside.
That positioning meant any sharp move downward would trigger an outsized selloff. Market commentators noted that funding rates and open interest had grown “frothy” going into each Trump-Iran headline, turning any negative surprise into a forced-selling cascade for over-leveraged longs.
This wasn’t even the first time this cycle. On March 22, a similar Trump ultimatum toward Iran sent Bitcoin from roughly $75,900 to the high $68,000s within hours, triggering an estimated $300M to $1Bn in liquidations, depending on the methodology used, with 85% of those liquidations hitting long positions. The pattern repeats because the structural setup, high leverage, concentrated positioning, keeps rebuilding between headlines.
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