Crypto markets continue to face significant stress, with more than $1.1 billion in positions liquidated over the past 24 hours, according to Coinglass. The majority of liquidations came from long positions, contributing to a broader $5.7 billion deleveraging this week to date, of which $3.46 billion has been long-side.
Crypto Faces Heavy Liquidations as Market Heads for 7% Weekly Drop
26 September 2025 - 10:57 CEST
Liquidations, losses
Ether (ETH -6.7%) led the losses with $450 million liquidations on Thursday, followed by Bitcoin (BTC -3.8%), Solana (SOL -8.9%), and Dogecoin (DOGE -7.5%). The Fear and Greed Index dropped from 41 to 32 overnight into Friday.
Memecoins are under pressure, with SPX down 16.9%, Pengu shedding 20%, and WIF falling 16% this week. The Altseason Index has rolled over from recent highs near 77, signaling that altcoins are broadly starting to underperform Bitcoin. This shift suggests selling pressure may remain elevated in the near term.
Tentative recovery
Markets are showing tentative size of recovery on Friday, with most major coins in the green since midnight UTC. Yet weekly returns are poised to close in negative territory, with the total market cap down -6.8%, at 14:23UTC.
The volatility is not usual and investors would do well not to focus entirely on the typical ups and downs of the crypto market, to avoid missing some of the other key developments this week.
DEX rivalries, Airdrops
Decentralized perpetual futures exchanges are showing signs of intensifying rivalry. Data from Dune highlight that newer entrants Aster and Lighter briefly surpassed Hyperliquid in daily trading volumes. However, Hyperliquid continues to dominate in open interest, suggesting deeper capital commitment and stickier positioning on established platforms.
ASTER’s Stage 2 airdrop, scheduled for Q4 2025, is being highlighted as potentially one of the largest token distributions of 2025. The event coincides with the project’s plans to launch its own L1 chain later this year and may have helped drive record trading volumes as users position for rewards. While airdrop campaigns often generate short-term activity, how prices react once tokens are distributed remains uncertain.
Stock-spike probes
Meanwhile, regulators in the US have opened investigations of more than 200 companies, signaling that while their approach to the industry may have softened, the crypto sector is not a lawless free-for-all.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the self-regulatory broker-dealer body FINRA are probing suspicious stock spikes tied to crypto-treasury announcements amid a wave of firms raising public equity as they embark on crypto-stockpiling strategies. These firms raised $102bn to buy crypto, often using NDAs with investors before going public, according to data cited by the Wall Street Journal.
