Bitcoin volatility spike causes over $63 million in liquidations

Bitcoin BTC +2.24% ‘s price is back above $43,000 a day after the U.S. Federal Reserve announced another rate pause at its latest meeting. However, a spike in volatility during the past 24 hours has caused over $63 million leveraged positions to be liquidated, according to Coinglass data.

The majority of the liquidations were shorts, with $38.4 million wiped out. There were also $24.7 million longs liquidated after bitcoin briefly pulled back below the $43,000 mark. The volatility that shook out many leveraged positions was a multi-week high for that metric, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard, which puts current annualized bitcoin volatility at 51.97%.

As the ongoing bitcoin rally has gained pace, annualized bitcoin volatility has steadily risen from a multi-week low of 40% at the beginning of December.

Price correction

According to YouHodler Chief of markets Ruslan Lienkha, the price correction earlier in the week was likely due to profit fixing by short-term investors and traders.

Ruslan said that the market volatility that occurred on Monday may not be an isolated incident. “We don’t see deleveraging in the market, crypto traders are continuing to take an elevated risk. For this reason, we might see an even higher volatility in the near future,” Lienkha told The Block.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization rose almost 3% over the past 24 hours to $43,245 at 12:50 p.m. ET, according to The Block data.

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