Bitcoin (briefly) pushes past $45k as short liquidations surge; here’s what’s next

ambcrypto.com:

The cryptocurrency industry breathed a sigh of relief this week, as many digital assets including Bitcoin showed signs of recovery from a tumultuous January. All eyes are on the top coin for now, as it breached the important $45,000 resistance level a few hours ago, for the first time in over a month, after gaining a 5.2% valuation over the past day.

This has followed a week of incessant pushing by the bulls that saw BTC prices going upwards of 17.5%. In return, the bears experienced a pushback as around $229 million in short positions was liquidated on perpetual markets in the past four days, according to data from CryptoQuant.

Source: CryptoQuant/Twitter

However, the aggregated funding rate remained negative, indicating that short positions continued to dominate BTC markets. Crypto analytics platform Santiment also pointed out the same, although, adding that this is generally a bullish sign as liquidation of these positions could cause Bitcoin prices to surge even further.

Moreover, a reversal in investor sentiment could also be noted recently, as the Fear and Greed Index for Bitcoin turned neutral after being in the fearful to the extremely fearful range since late November.

Tweets by BitcoinFear

A chunk of this positive momentum for the king coin can be attributed to bullish news pouring in over the past few days. Most recently, KPMG Canada, part of one of the big 4 accounting firms globally, announced that it was holding Bitcoin and Ethereum on its balance sheet. Valkyrie has also launched a Bitcoin mining ETF on Nasdaq today, only adding to the streak of enthusiasm.

The bullish investor sentiment could also have been triggered by a resurgence in their returns. Earlier today, average 30-day trader returns on both Bitcoin