Bitcoin was flirting with its all time high as it hit $72,000 Monday morning. This comes after a rocky start to the month, finishing the first week of April below its 2021 high of $69,044.
Bitcoin saw steady gains just shy of 2% over Saturday and Sunday, according to CoinGecko. But as Europe woke up for the new week, prices shot up 4.45% in 12 hours.
This jump is in line with a spike in BTC futures open interest—a measure of the total number of outstanding Bitcoin futures or options contracts in the market.
As a result of the market volatility over the past 24 hours, there have been $58 million of short positions liquidated, according to CoinGlass, with the highest single liquidation being $7.83 million.
This figure is even higher for the wider crypto market with over $121 million of short positions getting liquidated in the last 24 hours. In turn, Ethereum has also seen a 6.9% spike in value over the past day despite lagging behind Bitcoin over the last month.
Experts explained to Decrypt that Bitcoin's 3% drop last week was likely due to crypto fund manager Grayscale's outflows shrinking from $528 million to $80 million a day. While the US market is still yet to open, Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust has jumped in value while in pre-market.
All of this movement is in anticipation for the Bitcoin halving which is currently scheduled for April 20th—or 4/20 for the degens. Historically, this is a bullish event for long-term investors as, on average, Bitcoin's price increases by 3,230% after each halving, according to CoinGecko.
That said, Coinbase urged caution with this narrative saying that, "past performance is not an indicator for future success or performance."
Edited by Stacy Elliott.