Bitcoin Surge Causes Over $500 Million in Liquidations, Highest in Three Months

Crypto markets regained the $1 trillion capitalization mark for the first time since November.

Crypto markets surged to regain the $1 trillion market capitalization mark over the weekend amid signs of bottoming and a record number of short liquidations contributing to the uptick. Nearly $500 million in shorts, or bets against higher prices, were liquidated since Friday, marking the highest such levels since October 2022, according to data from Coinalyze. The liquidation figure means that over 70% of traders booked losses as exchanges closed leveraged positions due to a partial or total evaporation of the trader's initial margin. Crypto exchange OKX saw $256 million worth of short losses on Friday alone, the most among all crypto exchanges, 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 CoinGecko data. Bitcoin surged 22% to over $21,000 on strong CPI data, ether jumped to as much as nearly $1,600, while solana jumped almost 70%, trading at $24 on Monday from just $9 in the last week of December. The run wasn't wholly irrational, as the underlying networks of several major tokens saw favorable fundamentals. Strong transactional activity on Cardano and Solana may have contributed to a surge in their native ADA and SOL tokens, respectively, over the past week. Elsewhere, the upcoming Shanghai upgrade for ether has added to its fundamentals, while Polygon is scheduled for a hard fork this week, triggering a 22% rise in MATIC over the past week.