Bitcoin Surge causes over $500 million in liquidations, highest in 3 months

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Crypto markets surged back to the $1 trillion mark in market capitalization over the weekend amid signs of bottoming and a record number of short selloffs contributing to the upside.

Nearly $500 million in shorts, or bets against higher prices, have been liquidated since Friday to mark the highest levels since October 2022, according to data from Coinalyze.

Shorts liquidations were at their highest since 2021. (Coinanylze)

The liquidation figure means that more than 70% of traders suffered losses as exchanges closed leveraged positions due to partial or full evaporation of traders’ initial margin. Crypto exchange OKX posted $256 million in short losses on Friday alone, the most among any crypto exchange, followed by $125 million on Binance and $42 million on Huobi, according to CoinGlass data. .

Aptos native APT tokens saw over $10 million in liquidations in an unusual move as prices doubled over the past week.

Major cryptocurrencies are up an average of 20% since last week, according to data from CoinGecko. Bitcoin jumped 22% to over $21,000 on strong CPI data, ether soared to near $1,600, while solana jumped nearly 70%, trading at $24 on Monday compared to just $9 the last week of December.

The run was not entirely irrational, as the underlying networks of several major tokens saw favorable fundamentals.

Heavy transactional activity on Cardano and Solana may have contributed to an increase in their native ADA and SOL tokens, respectively, over the past week. Elsewhere, Shanghai’s upcoming ether upgrade added to its fundamentals, while Polygon is set for a network upgrade this week, triggering a 22% rise in MATIC over the past week.

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