Crypto Shorts Take $86 Million Beating As BTC Nears $31,000

Data shows the crypto shorts have observed a high amount of liquidations in the past day as BTC has seen a sharp rally towards $31,000.

Crypto Futures Market Has Seen High Liquidations In The Past Day

The past day has been volatile for the crypto market as Bitcoin and other assets have seen some sharp bullish momentum. As is usually the case, this volatility has resulted in some chaos on the futures side of the sector.

The below table shows how the liquidations have looked in the crypto futures market today:

It would appear that a large amount of liquidations have occurred today | Source: CoinGlass

As displayed above, the crypto futures market as a whole has seen liquidations of almost $120 million in the last 24 hours. Out of these, a little under $86 million of the liquidations were of short contracts.

Most of the volatility in this period has come from assets around the sector popping off so it makes sense that the shorts would bear the majority of the brunt. Mass liquidation events are popularly called “squeezes,” so since this liquidation event majorly involved the shorts, it would be an example of a “short squeeze.”

From the table, it’s also visible that most of this short squeeze ($65 million) occurred within the past twelve hours alone. This again lines up with price action, as this period is where the volatility was the most pronounced.

Now, here is how the liquidations in the past day were divided among the different symbols in the sector:

The distribution of the liquidations by symbol during the past 24 hours | Source: CoinGlass

Bitcoin futures contracts seem to have contributed the largest chunk of this liquidation flush today, while Ethereum has been the second largest. Followed by these two largest assets in the sector are the altcoins Chainlink (LINK) and Solana (SOL).

The reason these two cryptos have seen such high liquidations is that their rallies have been quite remarkable (with LINK seeing 35% profits in the past week, and SOL at 28%), so there has been some significant attention on these assets, which has naturally enticed traders to open futures positions related to them.

Liquidation squeezes like today’s aren’t a particularly rare sight in the crypto sector, as the general volatility of most of the assets is high, so volatile days like today can often crop up.

It would appear that the traders haven’t been discouraged by the liquidations today, though, as CryptoQuant analyst Maartunn has pointed out how the Bitcoin open interest has continued to head up.

The value of the metric has been going up in recent days | Source: @JA_Maartun

The “open interest” here is a measure of the total amount of positions open on the Bitcoin futures market. As is visible in the graph, this indicator is now close to the $10 billion mark.

BTC Price

Bitcoin had broken above the $30,900 mark earlier in the day, but the asset has since seen a pullback. Nonetheless, the coin hasn’t fallen off much, as it’s still trading around $30,600.

BTC has registered a sharp uptrend recently | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Kanchanara on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com