Ethereum (ETH) is trading near $2,387 at the time of writing, down just 0.1% over the past 24 hours, but the flat print hides a rougher session underneath, according to a report published by COINOTAG on October 18, 2026.

Forced closures removed $272.62 million of leveraged cryptocurrency positions in a single day, and Ethereum carried the largest single share of that total. Long positions on ETH absorbed approximately $106.9 million of the liquidation volume — roughly 39% of the day's total — per the report, with the remainder spread across the broader crypto derivatives market.

How Liquidations Work

Liquidations occur when a derivatives exchange forcibly closes a trader's leveraged position because the collateral in the account no longer satisfies maintenance-margin requirements. Long liquidations are triggered when an asset's price moves lower, eroding the value of positions betting on gains. When a cluster of such closures unfolds within a short window, the sequential unwinding can add volatility to an already active session.

Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and one of the most heavily traded assets on perpetual futures venues, where leveraged positions are common. As a result, its derivatives market frequently records some of the largest liquidation totals during volatile trading.

Notably, the $106.9 million in ETH long liquidations occurred even as the spot price showed only a marginal daily decline of 0.1%, illustrating that leveraged positioning can unwind sharply without a commensurate move in the underlying asset's quoted price. The divergence is partly mechanical: a 24-hour percentage change captures only the net difference between two points in time, so intraperiod price swings — including ones that later reverse — can still push undercollateralized longs past their maintenance-margin thresholds while leaving the daily figure nearly flat.

For readers tracking derivatives risk, the report quantifies how much leveraged positioning was forcibly closed but not how much remains outstanding. Open-interest and funding data on perpetual futures venues are the standard gauges outstanding leveraged exposure, and such figures are not included in the report, leaving the current scale of liquidation-prone positioning in ETH markets unquantified. What the data does establish is where the day's forced unwinding was concentrated: the largest identified pocket sat in ETH longs, within a $272.62 million wave that touched the broader crypto derivatives market.

This report was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/ethereum-longs-106-9m-liquidation-wave