Bitcoin Price Explodes Past $21,000 As 3-Day Short Liquidations Near $300M
Bitcoin (BTC) continued a stunning comeback on January 14th as it topped $21,000 for the first time since early November.
Bitcoin cracks key trendline for first time since $69K
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView tracked BTC/USD as it hit highs of $21,247 on Bitstamp overnight.
The couple was met with great suspicion after it began to make up some serious lost ground throughout the week, with analysts warning that a retracement could happen at any moment.
Nevertheless, only brief periods of consolidation accompanied Bitcoin’s rise, with weekly gains of nearly 25%.
In doing so, BTC/USD took out its realized price at $19,700, an old all-time high from 2017, $20,000 and the 200-day moving average. The latter saw its first resistance/support challenge since October 2021, a month before Bitcoin’s last all-time high.
“Like ETH, BTC is gaining momentum,” on-chain analytics resource Material Indicators noted if Bitcoin starts to copy Ether (ETH) strength on short time frames.
A tweet added that price action “has pushed past critical resistance at 200-day moving average and 2017 Top (BTC)/2018 Top (ETH).”
“Brace for volatility!” Material indicators closed.
“2 days left but this weekly btc candle is solid AF breaking very important trend lines and low time frame is still strong,” popular trader Bluntz, meanwhile, in summary about the upcoming weekly chart.
Fellow trader and analyst Rekt Capital went further, comparing it to a 2019 event that kick-started an entire Bitcoin bull market after the previous halving cycle’s macro low in December 2018.
“The current BTC Weekly Candle is very close to the April 2019 Weekly Candle which confirmed a new BTC Bull Market,” he commented next to a diagram.
Short liquidations of bitcoin set an 18-month record
Amid the now-rare upside, Bitcoin unleashed serious pain for bears, liquidating hundreds of millions of dollars in short positions.
Related: Bitcoin Gained 300% in Year Ahead of Last Halving — Is 2023 Different?
According to Coinglass, these totaled around $125 million for January 14th alone, and the period from January 11th onwards produced nearly $300 million in short liquidations.
Including altcoins, liquidations totaled nearly $775 million for the same three-day period.
Dylan LeClair, senior analyst at UTXO Management, commented on short futures, noting that these reached their highest daily levels since mid-2021.
“July 2021 saw Binance USDT denominated futures going extremely short BTC and paying an arm and a leg to do so,” he explained:
“USD-denominated shorts becoming liquid is the opposite effect of crypto-denominated longs winding down. 30,000 summer bottom was set day for FTX fresh increase.”
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