Shorts getting pinched
- Market chatter says about $200 million of short positions were liquidated within a single 24‑hour window. (x.com) - Negative funding rates plus rising open interest are adding pressure on remaining short sellers. (x.com) - The mix of liquidations and confident new longs is being linked to momentum in AI‑related names and indices. (x.com)
Short sellers in crypto got run over this week as roughly $214 million in positions were liquidated across the market in 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data. (coinglass.com) CoinGlass showed total 24-hour liquidations at about $213.63 million on April 24, with Bitcoin and Ether alone accounting for about $56.50 million and $56.59 million. The same dashboard showed total crypto open interest near $124.68 billion. (coinglass.com) A short is a bet that prices will fall; when prices rise instead, exchanges force leveraged traders to buy back contracts, which can push prices up even faster. CoinGlass says negative funding rates mean shorts are paying longs, a sign that bearish positioning has become crowded. (coinglass.com) That setup has been visible in artificial-intelligence-linked tokens, where CoinGlass says traders should watch funding, open interest and liquidations together because rising leverage can amplify a move in either direction. Its AI funding page says negative funding reflects a market bias toward shorts. (coinglass.com) Some of the sharpest moves came in smaller AI names. CoinGlass data for USD.AI, ticker CHIP, showed the token up about 94% over 24 hours in one snapshot, with open interest up about 678% to $108.32 million and 24-hour short liquidations at about $4.13 million. (coinglass.com) A later CoinGlass snapshot showed CHIP still up about 30% over 24 hours, with open interest at $160.14 million and total 24-hour liquidations at $22.21 million, including $14.24 million from shorts. That kind of shift suggests traders kept adding fresh positions even after the first squeeze. (coinglass.com) The broader AI-agent complex also showed traders piling in. CoinGlass’s AI Agents board listed tokens such as GRIFFAIN up 38.37%, ZEREBRO up 23.02% and TRADOOR up 18.49%, while several names posted double-digit gains in open interest over 24 hours. (coinglass.com) Not every AI token was rising. CoinGlass’s same board showed SIREN down 25.17% even as its 24-hour volume jumped to $1.64 billion and its liquidation tally reached $8.02 million, underscoring that leverage was cutting both ways across the sector. (coinglass.com) The AI-token rally is still small next to the broader market. CoinGecko put the total market value of the artificial-intelligence crypto category at about $22.1 billion on April 24, a fraction of Bitcoin’s roughly $1.57 trillion market cap shown by CoinGlass. (coingecko.com) (coinglass.com) For now, the squeeze looks less like a single headline and more like a positioning unwind: crowded shorts, negative funding and rising open interest meeting a burst of buying in AI-linked trades. (coinglass.com)
