In one of its most impressive rallies in about a year, Bitcoin skyrocketed by double digits, charting a two-month high above $21,000. Almost $600 million out of the $650 million in total are short positions.
A record amount of short liquidations helped the crypto markets surge to reclaim the $1 trillion market cap level over the weekend as they showed indications of bottoming. Nearly $500 million in shorts, or bets against increased prices, were liquidated since Friday to represent the largest of such levels since October 2022, according to data from Coinalyze.
As exchanges liquidated leveraged positions as a result of a partial or complete evaporation of the trader’s initial margin, the liquidation number indicated that over 70% of traders booked losses. According to statistics from CoinGlass, OKX, the largest cryptocurrency exchange overall, witnessed short losses of $256 million on Friday alone, followed by Binance with $125 million and Huobi with $42 million. APT tokens, Aptos’ native currency, witnessed over $10 million in liquidations in an unusual move as prices doubled over the past week.
According to statistics from CoinGecko, the major cryptocurrencies are up 20% on average since last week. On the strength of the CPI figures, Bitcoin increased by 22% to almost $21,000, Ether increased by as much as nearly $1,600, and Solana increased by about 70%, trading at $24 on Monday from only $9 in the final week of December.
Examples of double-digit price risers include Polkadot (20%), Shiba Inu (14%), Ethereum (10.5%), Cardano (11%), Dogecoin (11%), Polygon (10%), and OKB (10%). As a result, the total market value of cryptocurrencies has just approached $1 trillion on CoinMarketCap for the first time in months.
Figuring Out The Cause For the Surge in Bitcoin
The underlying networks of numerous important coins witnessed good fundamentals, thus the run wasn’t entirely crazy. Strong transactional activity on Cardano and Solana may have led to recent increases in both networks’ native ADA and SOL token prices. In other news, ether’s fundamentals have been strengthened by the impending Shanghai upgrade, while Polygon’s expected hard fork this week, which refers to a network update, has driven up MATIC by 22% over the previous week.
