SOL’s Short Squeeze Didn’t Last: Longs Took the Bigger Hit by Day’s End

Solana’s short squeeze had already reversed by the time the day was done. In the four hours leading into this report, long liquidations on SOL ran to $52.15 million against $21.08 million in shorts, according to CoinGlass, close to 2.5 times the short side. That flip followed a squeeze that, earlier the same day, had wiped out over $33 million in short positions as SOL climbed toward $95, per a post from SolanaFloor at 2:24 am UTC Saturday.

$SOL LIQUIDATIONS: Over $33 million worth of SOL short positions have been liquidated in the last 24 hours as $SOL approaches $95.

The largest single $SOL liquidation was $1 million at $94.30. pic.twitter.com/H2IKv60QkG

— SolanaFloor (@SolanaFloor) August 22, 2026

SolanaFloor’s post put the largest single liquidation at $1 million, at a price of $94.30. By the time CoinGlass’s own tally caught up with the rest of the day, that figure had grown to $4.6 million, hit during a concentrated stretch between 10:30 and 11:30 am UTC. The day’s combined total, long and short liquidations together, reached $112.8 million on Solana alone, more than three times the platform’s own seven-day average.

A break above $95 that held for neither side

The sequence points to a rally that lacked conviction from either the bulls or the bears. Shorts got run over on the way up past $80, then $88, then toward $95 over the course of the week. Once the move gave back ground, the longs who had piled in near the top took the larger loss. Neither position survived the swing intact, which is a different story than the one the morning’s $33 million figure told on its own.

Part of a bigger squeeze, but not spreading like one

Saturday’s liquidations sit at the tail of a much larger event. On Aug. 19 and 20, a market-wide short squeeze wiped out just shy of $3 billion in short bets across bitcoin, ether and solana combined, the eighth-largest liquidation event on record and the biggest short-side wipeout since 2021. Bitcoin shorts alone accounted for $1.42 billion of that total, ether $1.13 billion, and solana $104.67 million. The rally behind it looked driven by forced short-covering rather than fresh buying, and it came in the same stretch as a Treasury liquidity operation, a jump in bitcoin ETF inflows, and a White House meeting where Trump pushed Congress on crypto legislation.

What’s different this time is that the pain has stayed contained to Solana. In the hour before this report, liquidations in bitcoin, ether, XRP, dogecoin and several other majors each ran to the low hundreds of thousands to low single-digit millions, an order of magnitude below what SOL alone saw. This is also the third double-digit-million liquidation event Solana has been through this year: a two-and-a-half-year low near $68 in early June came with $88 million in long liquidations, and a drop below $76 in mid-July came with a $253 million liquidation event. In the weeks after that July drop, SOL spent time rebuilding above $83 and testing resistance near $84 before this week’s run carried it toward $95.

Whether SOL holds above $90 from here or gives back more of the week’s gains will decide which side of the trade takes the next hit. Both sides have already been burned once today.