Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) shed more than $4,000 from its price on Wednesday leading to large-scale liquidations across the board.

What Happened: The leading digital asset plunged by 7% during the early hours of Oct. 27, falling to a low of $58,200.

The sharp selloff resulted in $536 million worth of liquidations within one hour, according to data from Bybt.

A total of $508.65 million longs were liquidated and $28 million shorts were liquidated during the same period.

In the last 24 hours, a total of $893.69 million was liquidated from 179,859 traders. The largest liquidations occurred on Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) trading pairs with a total of $303.37 million worth of ETH positions liquidated. The single largest ETH liquidation order took place on the crypto exchange Bitfinex, where one trader lost $68.64 million.

Bitcoin liquidations in the last 24 hours stood at $189.77 million at the time of writing.

The large value liquidations were likely caused by significant amounts of leverage evidenced by the funding rates on major crypto exchanges such as Binance.

According to CryptoQuant analyst Jan Wuestenfeld, the increasing stablecoin supply on exchanges coupled with the sell-off supported the thesis that traders were exiting their positions and moving money back into stablecoins.

Photo by Pierre Borthiry on Unsplash