For Elon Musk, whose hatred for short sellers burns hard enough to reform Mjölnir a dozen times, the millions in losses suffered by shorts after Tesla’s CEO switched his Twitter biography to “Bitcoin” must look like Christmas and his birthday rolled to 1.
This one-word addition caused the bitcoin price to peak at $ 38,020 in 10 days and generated $ 387 million in short settlements on major exchanges, including Binance, Bitfinex, BitMEX, ByBit, Deribit, FTX, HuobiDM and OKEx.
The crypto market leader is trading at $ 37,390 so far, representing a gain of more than 15% from the $ 32,000 low seen during the European morning session.
Today’s settlement sold is the largest since January 2, when exchanges closed sales worth $ 575 million, according to data provider Coinalyze.
The forced closing of short positions occurs when the price moves above a predetermined limit, signaling the settlement mechanism to “regularize” or close the positions. A massive squeeze like this often pushes prices upwards, leading to an upward movement.
The market was tilted downwards
Data indicate that the market had a downward trend on Monday morning and some observers were anticipating a drop in prices, courtesy of greater inflows in the exchanges.
However, the sentiment became optimistic after Musk changed his mind. Twitter biography and tweeted: “In retrospect, it was inevitable.” The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who made no secret of your hate for short sellers, it may not have the intention of causing sales, but it may have popped the cork of a champagne bottle after seeing the carnage that its biological change has caused.
To document Elon’s ostentatious nod to the leading cryptocurrency, F2Pool, currently the largest mining group in hashrate, incorporated the latest tweet from the technology mogul into Bitcoin block 668,197.
Google’s searches for “bitcoin”, a barometer of wide interest, came after Musk’s enigmatic endorsement of bitcoin. It remains to be seen whether increased interest translates into more purchases and stronger price gains.
“I assume the United States session will try to follow the process of digesting the news,” Vishal Shah, an options broker and founder of the Alpha5 derivatives exchange, told CoinDesk. “Normally speaking, these things would have a quieter response. But, given the background, I think it may be ready for a continuation. “
So bitcoin is looking north, having pierced a two-week downtrend line on the daily chart. Resistance is seen at $ 40,112 (January 14 high), followed by the psychological level of $ 42,000.
See also: Dogecoin becomes the most mentioned encryption on Twitter as the price goes up
Update (January 29, 14:23 UTC): Adds information about incorporating Musk’s latest tweet into the Bitcoin blockchain.