XRP Liquidations Hit $31.5M and 90% Came From Longs — Shorts Barely Touched

The liquidation ledger for XRP over the past 24 hours reads like a one-sided fight: $31.5 million in total forced closures, of which $28.4 million — 90.2% — hit longs, spread across 4,274 separate liquidation events. In the most recent hour, longs lost another $609K while forced short closures rounded to zero. With XRP at $1.2651 after an 8.8% daily drop, the long side has taken essentially all of the damage.

News context: CryptoSlate covered Ripple's stadium-scale marketing expansion this week, a backdrop that kept retail conviction long straight into the breakdown.

The staircase of forced exits

The largest single liquidations map the decline precisely. OKX printed a major long wipeout at $1.3492 and Bybit at $1.3478 — the first shelf, where leveraged longs from the prior range broke. The next big OKX print came at $1.2696, right where the market now trades. That 6-cent staircase between shelves is the signature of a trending liquidation cascade rather than a single stop-hunt wick: each break created the selling that triggered the next.

Positioning hasn't caught up to the tape

Despite the damage, 75.9% of accounts with open XRP positions remain long — on Bitget it is 82.8%, on Bybit 78.4%. The taker flow splits sharply by venue: Binance takers are 59.9% buyers (dip-buying), while Gate takers are just 17.1% buyers, one of the most lopsided sell-side aggression readings on the board. Funding has flipped negative on five major venues. This combination — overwhelming long accounts, mixed-to-negative aggression, negative carry — means the liquidation engine still has abundant fuel if price makes another leg down.

Levels and the asymmetry

Our read: $1.2696 is now the live line, the exact price where the most recent large forced exit printed and where the market is consolidating. Holding it for 24–48 hours would let the negative funding do bulls a favor, paying them to hold while shorts finance the floor — the standard mechanical setup for a relief bounce toward $1.35, the underside of the broken shelf. Failure at $1.2696 exposes the psychological $1.20 handle with little liquidation history in between, meaning thin support. Given 90% of the forced flow has already come from longs, the marginal news is more likely to hurt the crowd than help it; treat bounces as rentals until the long-account ratio compresses below 70%.

Data as of 19:00 Beijing time on Sept 16, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate and other major exchanges.