Monday's market was nothing short of a massacre.

A billion dollars’ worth of leveraged positions evaporated in an instant, and panic spread through the market like a virus. Bitcoin plunged 8% during New York trading hours, hitting a low of $83,824—a number that reminded many of the crash in early October. In less than two months, the drop approached 30%. Ethereum fared even worse, plummeting in a halving-style dive to $2,719, wiping out 36% of its market capitalization in seven weeks.

Altcoins? It was a disaster scene.

Those small-cap coins usually favored by traders for their high volatility and explosive gains took the hardest hit. The MarketVector index tracking the bottom 50 of the top 100 tokens has already dropped nearly 70% this year. When liquidity dries up, these tokens fall like dominoes at the slightest touch.

In fact, this crash was foreshadowed. The wave of sell-offs a few weeks ago had already started to shake the market. At that time, a signal about tariffs from a U.S. official put pressure on global assets. According to Coinglass data, around $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated in those early October days—ironically, less than a week after Bitcoin hit its all-time high of $126,251. Insiders call this kind of cascading liquidation a "liquidation waterfall," and October 10 was a textbook example.

Traders are now watching liquidation data, trying to gauge how much leverage is left in the market, whether risk appetite has bottomed out, and if this correction has truly squeezed out all the speculative froth. The problem is, the data they have might be far from complete. Industry sources say that many exchanges hide part of their liquidation information from the public, making the true scale of leverage a persistent mystery.

Right now, the market feels like a black box.