Bearish Bets Forced Out as Bitcoin Surges Past $87,000

Crypto traders got a lesson in leverage on Monday as Bitcoin pushed to around $87,000. The price rise forced the closure of approximately $650 million worth of bearish bets, but open interest in derivatives positions rose by about 7.6% to around $156 billion.

The $650 million in liquidations included $278 million in Bitcoin shorts and $123 million in Ethereum shorts, according to CoinGlass data. Trading volume over 24 hours increased by about 39% to roughly $224 billion.

The speed at which the numbers were reported raises a question: where do these figures come from? The answer lies in how crypto derivatives markets are built. Most trading happens on large centralized exchanges that perform all three functions, exchange, clearinghouse, and broker, themselves.

These platforms hold every customer's margin and know every open position at every moment. As a result, they publish open interest through free public data feeds that update every few seconds or minutes. Data aggregators like CoinGlass collect these feeds from dozens of venues and add them together to produce a market-wide figure in close to real time.