ETH Moved 8.3%, Liquidated $255M in Shorts. BTC Moved Less, Lost a Third Less

Friday, ETH ripped 8.3% intraday, briefly touching $2,600, on the back of a stack of US economic data and retreating oil prices that flipped the market risk-on. In the wave that followed, $255 million in ETH short positions got liquidated in 24 hours — about $188 million of that in a single hour — while BTC, moving less than 4% over the same window, liquidated $172 million in shorts. Total liquidations across crypto that day topped $500 million. The numbers are Coinglass data, reported by Bloomberg and Cryptobriefing on September 11, 2026.

What stuck with me wasn't the size of the totals. It was that ETH's smaller market moved a bigger dollar amount of shorts than BTC's, on a move roughly twice as large. That's not really a story about which coin has more short interest sitting around — it's a story about which leverage band each move actually reached into. So I ran both moves through the same isolated-margin formula behind our own liquidation calculator.

The leverage line an 8.3% move crosses

For an isolated short, liquidation sits at roughly entry × (1 + 1/leverage − maintenance margin). Rearranged, the price move needed to wipe the position out is just 1/leverage − maintenance margin. With a standard 0.5% maintenance margin (the default our calculator uses for both BTC and ETH), solving that for an 8.3% move gives 1/leverage = 0.088, or leverage ≈ 11.4x.

That means any ETH short sitting at roughly 11x leverage or higher when that candle printed was gone. A short at 10x had about 9.5% of room before its liquidation price — enough to survive an 8.3% print, but not by much. Above 11x, there was no daylight left at all.

Run the same algebra on BTC's move. Reporting put it at "less than 4%," so treat 4% as the ceiling: 1/leverage = 0.045, or leverage ≈ 22.2x — and since the real move was smaller than 4%, the actual threshold sits higher than that, not lower. BTC shorts needed to be leveraged in the low-to-mid 20s or more to get caught by Friday's move. That's a much narrower, more reckless band than ETH's ~11x line.

Why the same day hit two coins so differently

An 11x threshold catches a lot of perfectly ordinary short positions — traders running what most exchanges default to or slightly above. A 22x threshold only catches people who were already running aggressive size relative to their margin. That gap in who gets caught, not just how big the move was, is a reasonable chunk of why $255M in ETH shorts came off versus $172M in BTC shorts on a move less than half as large. The dollar totals from Coinglass are a downstream effect of where each coin's move happened to land relative to common leverage settings — not a direct read on relative short interest.

I've written before about the exact move that liquidates a short or long at each leverage level from 5x to 125x, and about a backtest where winning trades still got liquidated at 20x before the strategy's own exit could fire. Friday's squeeze is the same mechanic playing out in live order flow instead of a backtest log: the leverage number someone typed into the exchange, not the size of the move itself, decided who was still in the trade an hour later.

What I do with this now

Before I'd size a short on anything, I now check where 1/leverage − maintenance margin sits against that coin's typical daily range, not just against what I hope will happen. If that number is smaller than moves the coin has already made this year — and an 8.3% ETH day isn't rare — the leverage is too high regardless of the setup's win rate. I run the exact number for a given entry in the ETH liquidation calculator before opening anything, and check the leverage itself against the safe leverage calculator rather than trusting whatever the exchange's slider defaults to. Squeezes like this one run in both directions — see how crowded the long side looks right now across 24 pairs.