A volatile weekend for risk assets saw bitcoin traders lose millions of dollars on their long positions as the market leading digital asset retrace to a multi-week low of $61,000.
Posted April 15, 2024 at 2:18 am EST.
Bitcoin sold off sharply on Friday after Iran launched a drone attack towards Israel, dropping to a low of $65,000 on the day and declining further to a near one-month low of $61,000 on Saturday.
Although some industry watchers have called a correction of this scale a “normal drop,” the sheer number of long positions liquidated over the two days suggests that a vast majority of market participants did not see this price reversal coming.
Data from Coinglass shows that $784 million crypto long positions were liquidated on Friday, followed by another $771 million longs liquidated on Saturday. According to onchain analyst Willy Woo, the worst of the liquidation train may now be over.
We flushed out long leverage down to $60k.
To liquidate lower, price would have broken the formidable $59k STH support, and a strong sign of a bear market.
More likely short liquidations to 71-75k is next.
Short term price is a walk of liquidations. https://t.co/CVMgOPqdmD pic.twitter.com/GFv5dEqwzF
— Willy Woo (@woonomic) April 15, 2024
As of late evening on Sunday, the price of bitcoin had recovered slightly from the selloff, and was trading around the $65,100 mark, while altcoins like Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polkadot (DOT) recorded double digit gains over a 24-hour period.
Shorter term price action might indicate that altcoins were in favour, but the rebound coincided with an uptick in bitcoin dominance, which rose to a three-year high, according to data from The Block.
Bitcoin dominance, which represents bitcoin’s value relative to other cryptocurrencies, now stands at 52.86% – the highest level since April 2021. This means that contrary to calls that an “altcoin season” may be in the works, the crypto market still remains fairly concentrated in bitcoin trades.
Everything red.
Liquidity from #alts flowing over to $BTC.
BTC-Dominance moving towards 56 %#Crypto @intocryptoverse pic.twitter.com/PtmdTSPSl0
— Chris 🔺 (@JesusChris00) April 12, 2024
“I don’t typically look at Bitcoin dominance, but the chart is impressive considering the amount of new altcoins birthed into the market every day,” noted popular pseudonymous crypto trader Bagsy on X.
For those still betting on an altcoin rally, it is worth noting that a select few tokens in the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization have actually outperformed bitcoin since the start of the year.
Those tokens include Dogecoin (DOGE), Stacks (STX), Binance Coin (BNB), Mantle (MNT), Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Render (RNDR).
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