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.”