The price of Bitcoin plunged on Wednesday to a monthly low of around $8,700. The sudden drop stung BitMEX traders particularly badly, with the platform reporting $157 million in liquidations in just a single day.

The Bitcoin price performance at the start of 2020 had many analysts bullish. With the rising price, optimism missing from the industry since the summer of 2019 bull run was starting to return.

Is the 2020 Bull Run Over Before it Really Began?

More recently, things have begun to look a little more shaky for Bitcoin. From a yearly high of around $10,400, the leading crypto asset has spent the last two weeks in a clear downtrend.

[jnews_block_28 second_title=”Featured Stories” header_type=”heading_5″ number_post=”3″ boxed=”true” show_border=”true”] As BeInCrypto reported previously, Bitcoin also experienced its fifth biggest hourly price drop in terms of dollar value ever this month. The plunge took a cool $1,000 off the price of BTC in less than 60 minutes. On Wednesday, the existing downtrend became even more pronounced. In fact, the market shed more than $10 billion over the course of the day. The sudden plunge in the Bitcoin price appears to have caught many BitMEX traders off guard. The volatility in price has caused the liquidation of around $157 million worth of trades.

As crypto asset market analysis firm Skew (@skewdotcom) points out, this is the highest dollar value of liquidations at the popular derivatives platform all year.

The previous largest day for liquidations in 2020 was on Jan. 20. At the end of Jan. 19, the Bitcoin price dropped by more than $400 in a matter of minutes. That too saw around $150 million suddenly change hands.

Optimistic Long Traders Wrecked

According to data taken from CryptoMeter.io, Wednesday saw more than $151.9 million worth of long traders wrecked and just $5.1 million worth of short traders [CryptoMeter.io].

The statistic shows a highly optimistic market, which given the hype surrounding the upcoming Bitcoin halving, is hardly surprising. It is not hard to see how a combination of steadily rising prices through 2020 plus talk of Bitcoin at $400,000 from some analysts would lead to so many traders being long.

Add a strong likelihood of leverage being used into the mix and the carnage only intensifies.