How liquidations work on Moon.com

A liquidation is how a leveraged trade ends when the market goes the wrong way: the price reaches the point where the stake is used up, and Moon.com closes the position. The whole stake is lost. It is the most common way to lose: of the positions tracked by Moon Alerts since 15 August 2026, one in three ended this way, more than all other losing trades combined.

This guide explains how the liquidation price is set, what can trigger a liquidation, and what our archive shows about who gets liquidated and how fast.

The liquidation price

On Moon.com, the stake is the margin of the position. The position is liquidated when the price has moved against it by 1 divided by the leverage. Moon.com calls this level the bust price and shows it before the bet is confirmed.

• long: entry price × (1 − 1/leverage)
• short: entry price × (1 + 1/leverage)

For a Bitcoin position opened at $84,000, this is where a long and a short are liquidated, and how far that is from the entry:

The liquidation price depends only on the entry price and the leverage. The size of the stake does not change it, and neither does the opening fee. The liquidation calculator works it out for any market, side and leverage, with the P&L at a target price.

What triggers a liquidation

Moon Alerts counts two kinds of closure as a liquidation:

1. The price touches the liquidation price. Moon.com settles the bet as lost as soon as the market touches that level, even briefly, sometimes at a slightly worse price than the last quote. It records the closure as a stop-loss at 100% of the stake. That is the default setting, and 91% of the positions where we record the stop-loss kept it (as of 28 October 2026).
2. Holding fees can no longer be paid. Moon.com says a bet kept open longer than 8 hours may pay periodic holding fees, also called funding fees, taken from the account balance, and that bets can be closed automatically when the balance cannot cover them. Our archive holds 81 such closures, all between 16 August and 14 September 2026, each at an exact multiple of 8 hours after the opening. Only 7 of them had lost the whole stake and 20 were in profit, but we count them all as liquidations. As of 28 October 2026, Moon.com reports a holding fee of zero on every position where we record it, including positions open since early September.

A stop-loss under 100% is a different story. A player can ask Moon.com to close the position once it has lost, say, half the stake. The trade then closes with at most half the stake returned, often less when the price moves fast: on the 93 positions we saw closed by a 50% stop-loss as of 28 October 2026, 38% of the stake came back on average. Moon Alerts counts such a trade as a loss, not a liquidation, unless nothing comes back. Closing by hand works the same way. The biggest loss in our archive that was not a liquidation, a $670,827 long on Ethereum at 20×, was closed manually on 17 October 2026 with $361,504 lost and 46% of the stake kept. Every definition we use is on our methodology page.

How fast it happens

At high leverage, a liquidation can come within minutes. The biggest liquidations in our archive are two $500,000 shorts on Bitcoin at 1000×, opened by the same player on 22 August 2026. The second one was opened at $77,001.54 at 16:02 UTC. Its liquidation price was $77,078.54, just 0.1% higher. Bitcoin touched it 13 minutes later, and the whole $500,000 was gone. The first one lasted less than four minutes.

Liquidation rates in the archive

Since 15 August 2026, Moon Alerts has archived more than 181,000 liquidations, for $21.8 million of stakes wiped out. To measure the rate without bias, we use only the positions we saw open and followed to their close: 272,968 positions as of 28 October 2026, all tracked by Moon Alerts.

Leverage is not the whole story. The market matters too. Here are seven of the ten most traded markets in the same sample, with the average leverage of each:

Bitcoin positions use almost the same leverage as NEAR, yet less than half as many end in liquidation. A market that swings more over a few minutes tends to reach a 0.1% line sooner.

Watching liquidation risk live

• Live positions lists the open positions we track, biggest first, with their liquidation price. This link shows only those near liquidation: a position is marked so once the price has covered 65% of the way from entry to that price.
• Trade history shows every liquidation we track, newest first, filterable by market, size and leverage.
• Records keeps the biggest liquidation of all time, and each market page, like Bitcoin, shows its worst trade and its biggest open positions.

Ways to give a trade more room

There are only a few levers. Lower leverage moves the liquidation price further away: 10% at 10× instead of 0.1% at 1000×. In our archive, 1.5% of positions under 10× were liquidated, against 38.8% at 500× and more. A stop-loss under 100% usually keeps part of the stake. A smaller stake limits what a liquidation can take. None of them turns a losing trade into a winning one.

For the bigger picture, read 1000× leverage explained.