Ether Futures See $230M in Liquidations as Merge Pushes ETH to $1.5K

Futures tracking ether (ETH) saw over $230 million in losses in the past 24 hours as buying pressure built up on the world’s second-largest crypto by market capitalization ahead of an essential catalyst in September.

Ether prices rose ahead of September’s expected Merge event. “Merge” refers to deploying Ethereum’s execution layer – the term for the current Ethereum network – to the “consensus layer” of the Beacon chain, the term for Ethereum’s upcoming proof-of-stake blockchain.

Some $137 million in shorts and $93 million in longs were liquidated. Liquidation is when an exchange forcefully closes a trader’s leveraged position due to a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial margin. It happens when a trader cannot meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position and fails to have sufficient funds to keep the trade open.

Ether rose as much as 10% in the past 24 hours and is up nearly 30% since last Monday. The asset traded at just over $1,500 in early European hours today – setting a one-month high – after breaking out of the $1,000 to $1,200 price range, price charts show.

Price charts suggest that prices could go as high as $1,800 if the current buying action continues. Meanwhile, support at around the $1,350 area exists.

Ether was trading at just over $1,000 last Thursday. The upward movement since then has caused losses of over $337 million in short liquidations, data from Coinglass shows. Saturday saw over $174 million in shorts liquidated, followed by $33 million on Sunday and $125 million on Monday as of writing time.

Saturday’s figures were the most losses on ether futures over the past three months. Meanwhile, the data shows that highly leveraged longs also took on significant losses amid the volatility, with over $194 million in losses over the past three days.

In the past 24 hours, FTX saw over $117 million in liquidations, the most among other exchanges, with OKX and Binance following with $85 million and $10 million, respectively.