A liquidation is a FORCED market order — a leveraged trader's position closed by the exchange when margin runs out. Forced orders don't care about price, and each one pushes price into the NEXT cluster of liquidation levels. That chain reaction is the cascade: crypto's signature move, where a modest dip becomes a 2% wick in ninety seconds.
The cascade's anatomy
- Setup: an extended move builds crowded leveraged positioning (watch funding). Everyone's stop-out levels stack in the same zone.
- Trigger: any push into the first cluster. The liquidations ARE market orders that reach the second cluster, and so on.
- Exhaustion: when forced flow runs out, price is far below where any VOLUNTARY seller wants to sell — the snap-back is violent, often retracing most of the wick.
Cascades end at exhaustion, not at 'support'. The tell is the reversal SPEED: V-shaped recoveries on huge volume mean the selling was forced, not chosen. That's why wick lows often never get revisited.
For the Sim Challenge: cascades are how knockout levels get swept 'out of nowhere', and why the both-stopped outcome exists. Respecting that BTC does this routinely is part of reading the game.