I thought I’d look at BTC short interest yesterday and had a hard time coming up with data. After an hour of googling I asked a couple of AI’s and came up with nothing. Is there a website that tracks the total spot BTC short interest? The cherry on top would be a chart that shows the short interest over time.
This story sounds earily familiar with the GameStop nonsense. I am sure some large players are looking to cash out and take the golden path. Akuma
I had ran across that page but it looks to be just futures data. I’m not really sure what that data means as all short futures contracts have a corresponding long. When it shows the short interest being high I assume that it is referring to the number of accounts that are net short vs net long. That leads me to think the small traders are on the short side of futures while the large traders are long. It’s strange that I can find out the number of shorts on any individual stock but can’t find info on short interest on spot BTC. It crossed my mind this morning that the large traders may be shorting spot BTC to provide a false supply that would keep price down temporarily (until it’s impossible to borrow any more to short). They could be hedging their spot short with long futures. That would suppress the spot price by selling fictitious supply. The futures hedge would allow them to still profit from a rise in price on the spot BTC they actually own. Is this even possible? It would take some deep pockets to maintain that racket. Wouldn’t imply an explosive up move when they run out of ammo?
Its been a long time since I read about this, but I think you nailed it. This exact thing, although I don't understand it too well, has been discussed before. And as you say, eventually you can't do it anymore, and the unwinding of this trade would be explosive to the upside. Right now they of course have the wind at their sails. So much bearishness out there, but its likely not too far away that liquidity starts getting pumped in, and rates come down, and we are off to the races.
so, about spot bitcoin short interest—it’s a bit tricky since shorting typically happens in futures or margin trading, not directly in spot markets. to gauge market sentiment, we often look at the long vs. short ratios on futures exchanges. coinglass.com offers insights into these ratios, showing the balance between active buying and selling volumes . another useful metric is open interest, which reflects the total number of outstanding derivative contracts like futures. coinalyze.net provides aggregated open interest data for bitcoin, giving a sense of how much money is flowing into these positions . while these metrics don’t represent spot market shorting directly, they can help us understand the broader market sentiment regarding bitcoin.
I think the top ladder shows the long short interest for the different spot markets (Binance, OKX, etc, etc) with the first one (BTC) showing overall balance This next one down shows the futures long/short ratio If you click onto one of the tokens. Eg: BTC it takes you another level deeper showing you where the activity is taking place That's because stocks are all on a centralized exchanges, meaning brokers and clearinghouses must report all short positions at regular intervals. Thus the info is easy to find. Crypto is spread across hundreds of unconnected and mostly unregulated online exchanges. This means there is no single entity collecting and publishing the info. Not to mention that there are many different ways to "short" crypto: Perpetual swaps, futures, sell BTC in Defi protocol, etc. While some places (Coinglass) do attempt to compile the info, we can never know what is happening on all exchanges at the same time.