Approximately $9.71 billion in crypto derivatives positions were liquidated over a 14-day stretch, with the overwhelming majority hitting traders who had bet prices would fall. The most violent phase struck on August 19-20, when a single-day event wiped out between $2.7 billion and $3 billion in short positions—the largest concentrated short liquidation since November 2021—with shorts making up roughly 92% of liquidations in that window and more than $1 billion closed in a single hour. Bitcoin surged from intraday lows around $64,100 to peaks exceeding $71,000-$72,000, while CoinGlass data attributed about $1.37 billion of the critical 24-hour short liquidations to Bitcoin and another $1.01 billion to Ethereum. Binance, Hyperliquid and Bybit recorded $518 million, $513 million and $303 million in short liquidations in a single session, in what multiple reports described as the largest forced short-covering event in crypto derivatives history. US Treasury bond buybacks that compressed yields supported risk assets as forced buying to close underwater shorts pushed prices higher and triggered further liquidations, taking cumulative short liquidations to about $7 billion in the seven days after the initial cascade. Bitcoin later extended toward a peak near $79,500 before sliding roughly 3% on August 22 to around $77,000, triggering long-heavy liquidations reported between about $380 million and $547 million over overlapping periods, alongside Coinglass-linked estimates of large potential liquidation intensity above $81,473 or below $73,968 on major centralized exchanges.