Dogecoin: 94 Percent of Liquidations Hit Long Positions, and How the Leverage Compares With Bitcoin

Positions worth $7.82 million were force closed on the futures market for Dogecoin within 24 hours. Of that, $7.32 million hit long positions, meaning bets on rising prices, and $503,630 hit short positions. Just under 94 percent of the losses therefore sat on one side. The data service CoinGlass puts the imbalance between the two sides at 1,453 percent, U.Today reports.

The interesting part is less the sum than the question behind it: how much leverage sits in Dogecoin at all, and how much of it may a retail investor in Europe use? On Friday afternoon we counted every open perpetual futures contract on DOGE and set the result next to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and XRP. The answer differs from what the meme coin's reputation suggests.

$7.32 million: what was force closed on the futures market

A liquidation is not a decision to sell. It is triggered as soon as the capital posted against a leveraged position no longer covers the paper loss. The exchange then closes the position itself, at whatever price is available. The investor is not consulted.

That almost everything sat on the long side says something about positioning ahead of the sell off: most leveraged traders were on the side of rising prices when the market gave way. In the short term that acts as an amplifier. Every forced closure of a long position is itself a sale, which pushes the price down further and can trigger the next position. That cascade explains why price moves in leveraged markets arrive in bursts instead of evenly.

There is also the spot market. In the four days to October 8, about $55 million flowed out of Dogecoin spot positions, according to CoinGlass figures. On October 8 the transaction tracker Whale Alert also reported a transfer of 304,709,765 DOGE, worth a good $27 million, to the exchange Binance. That equals just under 0.2 percent of the circulating supply of around 156.25 billion DOGE. A transfer to an exchange is not yet a sale; it merely makes one possible.

Where Dogecoin stands today, and what has changed since yesterday

On Friday afternoon DOGE trades at $0.084663, around 1.9 percent firmer than 24 hours earlier. The day's range ran from $0.081186 to $0.08548. The wave of liquidations is therefore already behind the market, and the price has recovered slightly since.

Yesterday in this slot we described the issuance without a cap, at $0.087 at the time and with 13.55 million new DOGE a day. Since then the price has given up around 2.7 percent while defending the $0.0832 we had marked as the lower edge on October 5. The daily low of $0.081186 sat below it; the closing area did not. What has been added since is the imbalance on the futures market, the subject here.

$1.9 billion in open positions: our count across 106 contracts

For this article we pulled the derivatives data from CoinGecko and counted every perpetual futures contract on Dogecoin listed there as active. The result: 106 contracts across various venues holding $1,899,522,358 in open positions between them. Open positions, known in the trade as open interest, describe the notional value of all contracts currently running and not yet closed.

The largest blocks are spread more widely than many assume. Binance leads with $219.7 million, followed by Gate with $206.9 million, Bybit with $120.1 million, MEXC with $118.8 million and Bitget with $115.8 million. No single venue holds more than 12 percent of the total. Trading on a decentralised perp exchange means moving within the same overall mass, only with a different counterparty.

A leverage ratio of 14.4 percent: Dogecoin is level with Ethereum and far above Bitcoin

The absolute sum says little until it is set in proportion. We therefore divided open futures positions by the market capitalisation of each coin. That ratio shows how much leveraged speculation sits on a market, measured against its size.

Own count of all perpetual futures contracts, data source CoinGecko, as of October 9. Market capitalisation from the same survey.

Dogecoin therefore carries a leverage ratio of 14.36 percent, putting it practically level with Ethereum, slightly below Solana and almost four times as high as Bitcoin at 3.82 percent. The finding cuts against the familiar story in two directions. On the futures market Dogecoin is no outlier at the top but mid table among the large altcoins. Strikingly low instead are Bitcoin and XRP, where a far greater share of market value rests on unleveraged holdings.

For a holder that yields a sober reading. If 14 percent of market value sits in leveraged positions, comparatively small price moves are enough to trigger forced closures. Bitcoin needs considerably more. That explains the larger daily swing in Dogecoin better than any description of sentiment.

Split funding rates: the venues where long positions are paying right now

Perpetual futures contracts have no expiry date. To keep their price pinned to the spot rate anyway, the long and short sides pay each other a fee at fixed intervals, the funding rate. When it is positive, long positions pay the short positions; when it is negative, the flow reverses. The rate therefore works as a sentiment gauge and a running cost at the same time.

In our survey that rate runs in both directions. On Binance and MEXC it stood at 0.0034 percent, on Bitget at 0.0097 percent, and on OrangeX, Phemex and WhiteBIT at 0.01 percent. There, the long positions are paying. On Bybit it stood at minus 0.0034 percent, on OKX at minus 0.0017 percent and on Gate at minus 0.0014 percent. There, the short positions are paying.

A uniform picture looks different. After a wave of liquidations that hit longs 94 percent of the time, a consistently negative rate would have been the expectation. The side switching from venue to venue points to mixed positioning rather than a clear direction.

Scale these numbers up to a year before dismissing them as small. A funding rate of 0.01 percent typically falls due every eight hours, so three times a day. That makes 0.03 percent daily and around 11 percent a year in running fees alone, on top of the spread and the trading fee. A position held for months has to earn those costs back first.

Two to one instead of fifty to one: the BaFin leverage cap for retail clients

The leverage used on global futures exchanges is not available to retail clients in Germany. With a general administrative act of July 23, 2019, BaFin transposed the product intervention measure of the European supervisor ESMA into German law. The act has applied since August 1, 2019 with no end date.

For contracts for difference on cryptocurrencies it requires initial margin of 50 percent of the notional value. That corresponds to maximum leverage of 2:1. For comparison, the other tiers of the same act: 30:1 for major currency pairs, 20:1 for gold and the main indices, 10:1 for other commodities, 5:1 for single shares. Crypto sits at the bottom end, justified by its wider swings.

Three further safeguards apply alongside, and in practice they change more than the leverage figure itself. The position has to be closed as soon as account equity together with unrealised gains falls below half of the total initial margin. Negative balance protection stops the account from going below zero, and retail clients carry no obligation to top up. Providers also have to display standardised risk warnings. Trading with a crypto broker supervised in Germany brings those limits automatically.

Perpetual futures before the supervisor: the ESMA statement of February 2026

This is exactly where the legal position for products such as the Dogecoin contracts counted above becomes interesting. In February 2026 ESMA published a public statement reminding firms to check whether derivatives marketed as perpetual futures or perpetual contracts fall under the national product intervention measures for contracts for difference. The trading name is irrelevant to the classification under MiFID II, the authority said. What counts is whether a derivative conveys leveraged exposure to an underlying and is not settled exclusively by physical delivery. Features such as trading on a venue, a funding rate or voluntary negative balance protection change nothing about that. PwC Legal's reading of the statement summarises the consequences for providers.

ESMA has issued no new rules with this. The authority has said that the existing ones apply. Where a perpetual futures contract on DOGE is distributed to retail clients in the EU and is to be classified as a contract for difference, the BaFin act applies with its 2:1 and its margin close out. Higher leverage is then found only with providers outside that framework, and therefore outside the negative balance protection you can otherwise rely on.

Liquidation price, funding cost and supervisor: the three figures before the next position

Three figures determine whether a leveraged position survives a market move, and none of them is the entry price.

The liquidation price is the first. It appears in the order window before the position is opened and states the price at which the exchange will force the close. Hold it against the daily lows of recent weeks: for Dogecoin this week's low was $0.081186, starting from $0.097 on October 4. A liquidation price that sits inside such a range will be reached at the next opportunity.

Funding costs are the second. Multiply the current rate by three payments a day and by your intended holding period. At 0.01 percent and three months that is around 2.7 percent of the notional value, which your position has to earn first.

The third is your provider's regulatory framework. Check whether it is supervised in Germany or the EU, whether negative balance protection applies and whether the margin close out takes effect at 50 percent. Without those three commitments you are carrying a different risk from the one you priced in.

The reverse test holds just as well. A holding in your own hardware wallet knows neither a liquidation price nor funding. In exchange it costs the full stake and requires you to secure the recovery words yourself. Which of the two forms suits you depends on whether you can sit out a price move or would rather an exchange took the decision for you.

DogeOS and the soft fork: the second strand beside the futures market

While the futures market explains the daily move, a development with a longer horizon is running on the chain itself. At the end of September DogeOS, a project from the team behind the MyDoge wallet, opened a public testnet. It is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, so developers can carry over existing tools and program code. Technically it is a zero knowledge rollup, an independent layer that writes its state to the Dogecoin blockchain at regular intervals. DOGE serves as the fee currency within it, and no separate network token was issued. According to the project, $6.9 million in funding comes from Polychain Capital.

One limitation belongs with this, and it is rarely mentioned. Dogecoin does not currently verify the zero knowledge proofs of that layer itself. Security rests instead on validators, a protected execution environment and a permissioned sequencer. For the main chain to verify the proofs directly, a protocol change would be needed that so far exists only as a draft. No date has been set for the mainnet launch.

Our assessment of the state of the Dogecoin futures market

In this newsroom's view, this week's wave of liquidations is not a Dogecoin special case but the predictable consequence of a leverage ratio of 14.36 percent. Three pieces of evidence from this article support that: the ratio itself, which practically matches Ethereum's 14.39 percent; the broad spread of open positions across 106 contracts with no dominant venue; and the split funding rates, which no longer show one sided positioning. Against it stands the fact that our snapshot captures a single day; whether the ratio sits that high structurally can only be said over several weeks. What the numbers do not yield is any statement about price direction. The ratio describes the violence of moves, not their sign.

Dogecoin leverage: in Germany the cap is 2:1, not 50:1

What you can take from this day's figures comes down to three steps:

1. Check what leverage your provider works with and whether it is subject to the BaFin act. An overview of supervised providers is in the crypto broker comparison.
2. Before any leveraged position, calculate the liquidation price against the weekly low and the funding costs against your holding period. Which venues offer which terms is shown by the perp exchange comparison.
3. Decide deliberately between a leveraged position and a holding. A holding needs custody you control yourself, for instance from the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Trading leveraged products can lead to the total loss of the capital employed.)