One leveraged wallet in five is misclassified when you ignore free collateral
74 wallets holding open BTC positions. Naive margin maths says 96% could defend their position. The venue says 76%.
When a leveraged position approaches its liquidation price, the trader can usually top up margin and push that price away. Whether they can is the difference between a cluster that is real and one that evaporates.
The obvious way to work it out is accountValue − totalMarginUsed. We checked it
against the venue's own withdrawable figure on 74 wallets holding open BTC
positions.
| arithmetic matches the venue | 19% |
| naive says the wallet can defend | 96% |
| the venue says it can defend | 76% |
| misclassified | 20% |
| median overstatement | $4,906 |
| largest overstatement | $3,601,390 |
The mismatch is one-directional. withdrawable is systematically lower
than the margin arithmetic implies, and frequently exactly zero for wallets the
calculation says hold six figures free.
Why it cannot be reconstructed
The venue applies constraints beyond position margin — plausibly margin reserved against open orders, isolated allocation, or restrictions on unrealised PnL. Whatever the cause, the number is computed by the exchange and is not a function of the fields a reconstruction would have.
No data provider we surveyed exposes it. A defensibility metric built on their fields would be wrong for a fifth of wallets — always in the direction of making the market look safer.
And the money is more trapped than the headcount
In a live snapshot, 93% of wallets near liquidation held zero free collateral — but 99.8% of the notional did. The large positions are disproportionately the undefendable ones.