Bitcoin Sparks Short Liquidation Cascade Over $300M as Price Blasts Past $94K

Bitcoin briefly surged past $94,000 early Tuesday morning at around 4am ET, triggering a massive unwinding of short positions that accelerated its upward momentum.

At time of publication, Bitcoin’s price has retreated slightly to $93,681, up 5.7% on the day, according to data from CoinGecko.

The price action decimated bearish bets, with roughly $300 million in Bitcoin shorts liquidated in the past 24 hours, per data from Coinglass. Total crypto market liquidations reached approximately $650 million, with short positions accounting for approximately $565 million of these forced closures.

Short positions for Bitcoin represented the “largest single-day short liquidation event since October 2022,” according to Presto Research analyst Rick Maeda, who told Decrypt that over $156 million of these occurred on Bybit.

Maeda noted that funding rates for Bitcoin futures on Bybit stayed below 2% this week. This suggests that what we’re seeing isn’t a “crowded basis trade,” but more likely “either a large directional bet” or  cross-exchange price differences being exploited that collapsed and “unraveled in the short term,” he explained.

But given these indicators, Maeda suggested the liquidation cascade is a classic short squeeze, where rapid increases force traders with short positions to close their trades, further accelerating upward price movement.

“It amplifies upside volatility as stops are triggered and margin calls force covering,” Maeda said, adding that liquidity in today’s markets are “still relatively thin compared to bull market peaks.”

Bitcoin and gold

Bitcoin has “continued to register new local highs in tandem with gold,” over the past week, according to Pat Zhang, head of research at WOO X, a centralized crypto futures and spot trading platform.

Over the weeks since President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs caused a global market rout and prolonged instability, “a clear risk-transfer mechanism has emerged: in the absence of positive macro catalysts, U.S. equities trend lower, often dragging BTC with them,” Zhang said in a research note exclusively shared with Decrypt.

Zhang noted that when risk-off flows dominate, “gold and gold-backed instruments experience strong inflows.” Those “spill over into BTC” and reflect a market structure “where crypto-native and macro-driven capital interact.”

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index, a key barometer for market sentiment, rose dramatically from 29 to 72 points in just one week, moving from “fear” to “greed” territory.

Users on decentralized prediction market Myriad, launched by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN, put the likelihood of the index remaining above 55 on April 24 at just under 80%.

Broader institutional factors are also at play, Zhang notes, citing reports that Cantor Fitzgerald is planning out a $3 billion Bitcoin acquisition vehicle.

This development could “lead to a significant flow of Bitcoin from smaller retail investors to institutional users,” increasing Bitcoin’s market penetration and “laying the foundation” for it to move beyond $150,000.