$229M In Bitcoin Shorts Liquidated As Cryptocurrency Reclaims $44,000

Traders with a bearish bias saw massive liquidations in the last four days as Bitcoin BTC/USD surged 17% to a price of $44,700.

What Happened: According to data from on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, $229 million worth of short positions were liquidated in the crypto perpetual futures market after Bitcoin breached the $43,800 mark.

As of early Tuesday morning, data showed that aggregated funding rates were negative, meaning that despite the high-value liquidations, most traders are still betting on lower prices.

Funding rates typically indicate traders’ sentiment in the perpetual swaps market. Negative funding rates indicate that short position traders are dominant and are willing to pay long traders. Negative funding rates indicate that a large proportion of traders are bearish.

Data from Coinglass confirms even more short positions were liquidated in the last 24 hours. A total of 66,964 traders were liquidated for $255 million, of which $182 million were short positions.

In the last day, $91.9 million BTC, $37 million Ethereum ETH/USD, $5.7 million Shiba Inu SHIB/USD and $1.81 million Dogecoin DOGE/USD shorts were liquidated.

According to Glassnode, Bitcoin’s counter-trend rally is likely to have been partially influenced by a short squeezem evidenced by a large number of short liquidations.