Bitcoin (BTC) drastically crashed this week, revisiting levels of over two months ago and affecting the cryptocurrency market‘s sentiment. In a dominating bearish market, traders started favoring short positions, which can lead to short squeezes in the following weeks.
Notably, long-position traders lost $400 million in liquidations during the crash, as fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) took over. This long squeeze rebalanced Bitcoin’s derivatives market, clearing most of the opened long positions.
As a result, the market’s open interest (OI) has weighted toward shorts, reaching record negative funding rates year-to-date. Finbold retrieved data from CoinGlass on March 3 showing BTC’s OI-weighted funding rate at its worst levels of 2024.
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Essentially, negative funding rates mean Bitcoin short-sellers have to pay interest to long-position traders as they hold their positions. This is a mechanism created to keep the open interest balanced among longs and shorts even during high volatility events.
Bitcoin short squeeze and likely price targets
As of this writing, Bitcoin was trading below the key resistance level of $60,000 per coin. This level is important from both a psychological and technical analysis perspective, considering it has been strong support since March.
Therefore, breaking out from the $60,000 could lead to a sentiment shift to the ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO). Thus, triggering two potential short-squeeze events as massive collateral liquidity pools can become BTC price targets for market makers.
In particular, Bitcoin has over $1.72 billion worth of short-seller liquidations at $71,715. However, CoinGlass’s 1-month heatmap also shows significant liquidity at $67,420 and smaller pools around both key zones.
A short squeeze could reward Bitcoin traders with gains of 14% and 21% from the $59,200 at press time to the first and second liquidation levels, respectively.
Despite the optimistic outlook for a potential short squeeze and over 14% gains, investors must remain cautious with Bitcoin trading. This is due to macroeconomic concerns related to the Fed’s interest rates and microeconomic concerns related to Bitcoin miners’ revenue drop, which affects network security.
In this context, investment experts from the renowned bank Standard Chartered foresee BTC reaching between $52,000 and $50,000 in the short term.
Nevertheless, cryptocurrencies, including BTC, have high volatility and are hard to forecast further performance.
Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.
