Liquidation cascades: what one looks like, from our own records

What a cascade is

Most crypto futures trading uses leverage: a trader posts margin and opens a position several times its size. When the price moves far enough against the position that the margin can no longer cover the loss, the exchange closes it — a liquidation. A long is closed with a forced sell, a short with a forced buy.

One liquidation is a single order. A cascade is what happens when the forced orders arrive fast enough to move the price themselves: the forced selling of one batch of longs pushes the price down to where the next batch is under water, and the exchange sells those too. The move feeds on itself until the positions that were close to the edge are gone.

One cascade, from our records: 7 October 2026

Darkmen records every order on Binance's futures liquidation stream. On the night of 7 October 2026 (UTC) it looked like this:

• 01:30–01:52. A quiet hour. The prices at which BTCUSDT longs were being force-closed sat around $85,200.
• 01:55:05. Liquidations inside the last 60 seconds passed $3M — $4.3M across 226 orders, all longs. This is the point at which the gate fires.
• 02:00:05. The next alert the cooldown allows: $20.6M in the previous 60 seconds, 896 orders, longs only.
• 02:00:30–02:01:30. The worst minute: $143.8M across 9,441 liquidations on 734 contracts, 99% of it longs. The largest pieces were ETHUSDC ($33.4M), BTCUSDT ($28.5M) and ETHUSDT ($25.6M). BTCUSDT longs were closed as low as $83,503 — two percent under where they had been half an hour earlier.
• 02:05 onwards. The bursts faded. The last to clear $3M came at 02:05:25, and by 02:10 BTCUSDT longs were being closed near $84,000 again.

Over the whole hour from 01:30 to 02:30 we recorded $223.3M of forced orders.

For scale: Amberdata counted $3.21 billion liquidated market-wide in the single worst minute of the 10 October 2025 crash, 93.5% of it forced selling (Amberdata's analysis of 10 October 2025). Our figures cover one exchange and only the orders its public stream sent us, so they are a fraction of the market.

These figures were recomputed on 29 October 2026 from the recorded orders. Until that day the module priced coin-margined contracts (BTCUSD_PERP and similar), whose size is a count of $100 or $10 contracts, as if each were a coin, and the totals it sent were overstated — the alert at 01:58 that night reported $104M where the orders came to $8.1M. That is fixed; the numbers above use the corrected count.

What the alert gives you

• The total liquidated in the 60-second window, and the number of orders it took. A large total in few orders is a handful of big positions; the same total in thousands of orders is the market's leverage being cleared out across the board, as on 7 October.
• The dominant side. Longs liquidated means forced selling; shorts liquidated means forced buying. Neither is a forecast: on the night above the price kept falling for six minutes after the gate first fired, then won part of it back within a quarter of an hour.

Plan and delivery

Liquidation Cascades is a Basic module, delivered to Telegram or the live web feed, whichever you connect. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.