Liquidations › The 5 February sweep

Price ran into the band, and cleared it

A liquidation map is a model, and a model that is never tested is decoration. On 5–6 February 2026 Bitcoin fell from $73,139 to a $60,000 wick in thirty hours on 4× the volume a stretch that long normally carries. Below is the modelled field for that window with the observed price drawn over it. Watch the bright bands under the price end where the candles reach them.

$73,139 → $60,000observed, 5–6 Feb
-18.0%peak drawdown in the window
27×the busiest hour against the prior median
$2.43Bmodelled notional price traded through
5 Feb, 23:00 — low $60,00060,00065,00070,00075,00080,0003 Feb5 Feb7 Feb9 Feb11 FebMODELLEDCLEARED BY PRICE$205.9M peak bar
none$10.0M$20.0M$30.0M≥ $36.4M

1–12 February 2026, two-hour bars. Brighter is more modelled notional standing at that price at that moment; the peak cell is $55.3M. A band ends one of two ways: price trades through it, which is why the picture goes dark behind the candles, or the positions behind it age past the 14-day turnover window and it fades out in four steps.

What the picture actually claims

Price traded through where the model places levels. That claim is checkable: the candles are Hyperliquid's own, the level arithmetic is on the published margin tiers, and both are printed below. The claim is not that $2.43B of positions were liquidated. No venue publishes a complete liquidation feed — Binance throttles to one event per symbol per second, and Hyperliquid's block data carries no liquidation-typed action at all, which we checked directly. What is modelled is where the levels were. What is observed is that price went there.

The six bars that cleared the most

Ranked by modelled notional whose level the bar's high or low crossed. This is model output against observed price — the price column is fact, the notional column is not.

Bar (UTC)OpenHighLowCloseVolumeModelled notional cleared
5 Feb, 19:00 $66,319 $66,605 $62,156 $63,725 33,698 BTC $205.9M
5 Feb, 15:00 $69,393 $69,576 $66,709 $68,278 33,111 BTC $197.1M
5 Feb, 23:00 $63,904 $64,888 $60,000 $63,493 27,076 BTC $159.5M
3 Feb, 17:00 $76,461 $76,495 $73,111 $73,121 14,775 BTC $152.4M
2 Feb, 03:00 $76,453 $76,573 $74,564 $75,853 10,038 BTC $115.2M
6 Feb, 15:00 $68,146 $70,170 $67,748 $69,907 16,808 BTC $111.1M

The hour itself

The 30-hour slide is the setup; the payoff is a single bar. At 6 Feb, 00:00 UTC BTC opened at $62,894, printed a low of $60,000, and closed back at $63,493 — a 4.6% excursion recovered inside sixty minutes, on 21,271 BTC of volume against a prior hourly median of 964. A wick with no close behind it is the shape a forced-seller cascade leaves: the sells are not discretionary, so they take whatever bid is there, and the price snaps back once they stop. The model puts a dense band exactly in the path of that wick, and afterwards the band is gone.

How this window was chosen

Not from memory. The model was run forward over the full hourly series Hyperliquid publishes for BTC, accumulating the modelled notional each bar's range crossed, and the windows were ranked. By 24-hour total, 5 February 2026 comes first by a wide margin, and it is also the largest volume spike anywhere in the series. The next two candidates were rises rather than falls — the same mechanism on the short side, with less force behind it. Any of them could have been drawn; this one shows the most. The 650 bars needed to redraw it are frozen in this repository.

Inputs, frozen

InputValueObserved?
Candles650 hourly bars, 2026-01-17 to 2026-02-14, from Hyperliquid POST /info candleSnapshot, fetched 2026-08-14observed
Drawn window1–12 February 2026, aggregated to 2-hour bars (138 columns)observed
Warm-up168 bars — 14 days — of book built off-screen before the first drawn columnassumed
Maintenance margin1.250%, from Hyperliquid's tier 1 at 40× max leverageobserved
Modelled book size$2.57B — open interest when this file was frozen on 2026-08-14. Historical open interest is not published, so this sets the model's scale, not its shape.assumed
Leverage mixBalanced — Weight spread across the range, tilted slightly to the middle. A deliberately unopinionated default.assumed
Drawn price range$57,990 – $81,296, set by the traded range. 54.82% of modelled notional liquidates outside it.observed

Change it and the bands move. That is the point of printing the assumption rather than hiding it behind a "Model 1 / Model 2 / Model 3" tab strip.

Every hour of the event, as traded

Hyperliquid's own candles from 5 February 00:00 to 6 February 06:00 UTC, unmodified. The chart above is drawn from these.

Hour (UTC)OpenHighLowCloseVolume (BTC)vs median
5 Feb, 00:00 $73,139 $73,306 $72,721 $72,825 1,859 1.9×
5 Feb, 01:00 $72,827 $73,310 $71,955 $72,371 2,701 2.8×
5 Feb, 02:00 $72,377 $72,804 $71,265 $71,452 4,630 4.8×
5 Feb, 03:00 $71,452 $71,845 $71,121 $71,202 3,153 3.3×
5 Feb, 04:00 $71,202 $71,410 $70,687 $70,860 4,393 4.6×
5 Feb, 05:00 $70,852 $71,139 $70,114 $70,715 4,740 4.9×
5 Feb, 06:00 $70,717 $70,969 $70,443 $70,938 2,265 2.3×
5 Feb, 07:00 $70,938 $71,594 $70,634 $70,725 2,982 3.1×
5 Feb, 08:00 $70,730 $71,536 $70,665 $71,042 1,748 1.8×
5 Feb, 09:00 $71,042 $71,956 $71,041 $71,552 1,422 1.5×
5 Feb, 10:00 $71,552 $71,716 $70,630 $70,842 1,583 1.6×
5 Feb, 11:00 $70,842 $71,038 $69,886 $70,298 4,778 5.0×
5 Feb, 12:00 $70,299 $70,577 $69,149 $69,555 8,510 8.8×
5 Feb, 13:00 $69,557 $69,840 $69,250 $69,680 3,256 3.4×
5 Feb, 14:00 $69,680 $70,853 $69,278 $69,392 9,502 9.9×
5 Feb, 15:00 $69,393 $69,576 $66,709 $67,465 24,742 25.7×
5 Feb, 16:00 $67,465 $68,700 $66,926 $68,278 8,369 8.7×
5 Feb, 17:00 $68,279 $68,341 $66,146 $66,175 10,849 11.3×
5 Feb, 18:00 $66,175 $66,527 $65,364 $66,316 9,745 10.1×
5 Feb, 19:00 $66,319 $66,605 $65,160 $65,235 7,328 7.6×
5 Feb, 20:00 $65,235 $65,671 $62,156 $63,725 26,370 27.4×
5 Feb, 21:00 $63,726 $64,721 $62,879 $63,216 13,247 13.7×
5 Feb, 22:00 $63,216 $64,585 $62,665 $63,904 10,301 10.7×
5 Feb, 23:00 $63,904 $64,888 $62,690 $62,894 5,805 6.0×
6 Feb, 00:00 $62,894 $63,836 $60,000 $63,493 21,271 22.1×
6 Feb, 01:00 $63,491 $65,730 $63,481 $65,667 7,362 7.6×
6 Feb, 02:00 $65,668 $65,968 $64,207 $64,965 5,955 6.2×
6 Feb, 03:00 $64,967 $65,131 $63,730 $64,133 3,438 3.6×
6 Feb, 04:00 $64,131 $64,987 $63,918 $64,884 1,357 1.4×
6 Feb, 05:00 $64,883 $66,794 $64,763 $66,374 4,005 4.2×
6 Feb, 06:00 $66,369 $66,741 $64,789 $64,935 3,597 3.7×

The live liquidation map → · Leverage survival — nothing modelled → · BTC funding and price →