Bitcoin Price Continues to Rally as $147 Million in Shorts Are Liquidated

As the biggest digital coin by market cap continues to soar, those who bet on the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to drop are losers: Over $79 million in BTC short positions have been wiped out in the past 24 hours.

That's according to data from analytics firm CoinGlass, and looking at shorts across all cryptocurrencies, $147 million in positions have been liquidated during the same span.

Shorts are derivative contracts that allows investors to bet that the price of an asset is going down. If a short is liquidated, then the trader has lost the bet and their position is closed.

BTC has shot up following an influx of capital the past couple of weeks into large crypto investment products—mainly the 10 BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The new Bitcoin ETFs got the green light from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on January 10. Since then, a lot of capital has entered the funds—which give investors exposure to the biggest digital asset—and helped push up the price of BTC.

A CoinShares report on Monday showed that last week, $1.1 billion entered the funds focusing on digital assets.

Bitcoin is now trading for $51,680, up by more than 6% in the past day. In the past week, the coin widely dubbed "digital gold" is up by 20% in a week. However, it is still down by 25% from its November 2021 all-time high of $69,044.

Edited by Andrew Hayward