Bitcoin Open Interest Remains High Despite Price Drop, What’s The Significance?

In an interesting turn of events, the Bitcoin open interest has remained high even at a time when the price has been dropping. This suggests that despite the price crash, investors are still looking favorably at the pioneer cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin Open Interest Stays Close To All-Time High

The Bitcoin price has seen a decline over the last week, pushing it from over $70,000 to below $66,000 in the process. Usually, a decline such as this would be greatly reflected in the open interest of the cryptocurrency. However, that has not been the case, as Coinglass data shows.

Rather than see a significant fall, the open interest has held up quite nicely, staying close to its all-time high. To put this in context, the Bitcoin open interest had hit a new all-time high of $36.87 billion earlier this month on June 6. Presently, the Bitcoin open interest is at $33.84 billion.

The current figure means that the open interest has only fallen around 10% in the last two weeks, losing around $3 billion in this time period. However, this means that investors are still heavily investing in Bitcoin and are continuing to take positions at this time.

The open interest measures all of the futures of options contracts for an asset open in the market. Therefore, the lower it is, it means traders are not taking as much positions. This is why the Bitcoin open interest staying close to its all-time high is important.

BTC Crash Drives Liquidations above $110 Million

With the Bitcoin price crash, a large number of traders have seen their positions liquidated. According to data from Coinglass, approximately 44,000 traders have been liquidated in the last 24 hours. The total dollar figure has come out to $111 million at the time of writing.

Naturally, BTC is in the lead with over $30 million in positions liquidated. However, Ethereum is not far behind, as $22.65 million has been liquidated in the last 24 hours. Other notable liquidations have happened with Solana with $6.34 million, PEPE with $3.76 million, and Notcoin with $2.92 million.

As for which side has suffered the most liquidations, the data shows an almost perfect balance, with 50.93% being short. However, as the price begins to recover, shorters have begun to lose more at a rate of 71.29% in the last hour.

Meanwhile, the single largest liquidation order was across the BTCUSD pair on the Bybit exchange as a trader was liquidated for $8.09 million. Also, the majority of the liquidation have occurred in the last 24 hours, with $80 million lost.

Featured image created with Dall.E, chart from Tradingview.com