Bitcoin Holds $76K as $346M in Shorts Get Liquidated in 24 Hours
Crypto derivatives opened this morning with open interest at $112.45B across 2,614 tokens and 24-hour trading volume of $192.03B, according to aggregated exchange data. Bitcoin changed hands near $76,269 while the average funding rate across major perpetuals sat at just 0.0018% per 8 hours — essentially flat, signaling neither longs nor shorts are paying a meaningful premium to hold positions. The broader tape stayed in balance: average RSI across tracked coins read 50.8 and the Fear & Greed Index printed 50, both squarely neutral.
Liquidations Skew Short
The past 24 hours saw $346.1M in total liquidations across roughly 87,800 positions, and the split tells the real story: $201.0M came from short liquidations versus $145.1M from longs, a 58/42 skew that points to a market grinding higher into resistance rather than one getting rug-pulled. Ethereum led coin-level liquidations at $99.5M, ahead of Bitcoin's $85.7M and ZEC's $69.0M — notable given ZEC's own rally over the same window. By venue, Binance absorbed the largest share at $136.5M, followed by OKX at $80.0M and Hyperliquid at $51.3M, where the single largest liquidation of the period hit: an $18.4M short on BTC filled near $76,525.
BR and SYN Rip While AIN Craters
Futures markets showed wide dispersion beneath the calm headline numbers. BR led gainers with a 159.2% surge to $0.656 on $876.6M of volume, followed by SYN's 92.3% jump to $0.181 on $743.4M in turnover. LSK climbed 51.9% to $0.510 while pulling in a hefty $2.07B in volume, and ZEC extended its recent run with a 20.9% gain to $1,341 on $11.1B traded — among the heaviest volume of any asset in the dataset. On the other side, AIN and its bridged counterpart AINBSC both collapsed roughly 86.8% to $0.0224, with AIN alone changing hands on $386.8M of volume, underscoring how violently low-cap perpetuals can reprice inside a single session.
Verdict: with open interest at $112.45B and BTC options showing a 0.55 put/call ratio, the short-liquidation-heavy tape argues spot is still probing higher toward the $77,500 max-pain strike for the Sep 18 expiry. A push through that level alongside open interest expanding past $112.45B would confirm the squeeze has further to run; a slide back below Bitcoin's current $76,269 with liquidations flipping long-heavy would invalidate the thesis and pull price toward the $72,000 max-pain magnet sitting under September 25's $14.37B options expiry. Data as of 08:13 Beijing time on Sep 17, covering Binance, OKX, Bybit and other major venues.