Bitcoinist
May 3, 2026 3:00 AM UTC

Bitcoin Leverage Surges As Traders Bet On $70,000 Breakout

Data shows the Bitcoin Open Interest witnessed its largest daily spike since July 2025 as the cryptocurrency’s price neared the $70,000 mark. Bitcoin Perpetual Futures Open Interest Shot Up Recently In a new post on X, on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has highlighted how the Bitcoin Open Interest witnessed a sharp jump recently. The “ Open Interest ” is an indicator that measures the total number of perpetual futures contracts related to BTC that are currently open on all derivatives platforms. When the value of this metric rises, it means investors are opening up fresh positions on the market. Such a trend can be a sign that speculative interest in the asset is going up. On the other hand, the indicator registering a decline suggests investors are either pulling back on risk or getting liquidated by their platform. Now, here is the chart shared by Glassnode that shows the trend in the daily percentage change for the Bitcoin Open Interest over the last year: As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin Open Interest has seen a notably positive daily percentage change recently, indicating that the investors opened up a large amount of positions at once. This spike, which happens to be the largest since July 2025, came as BTC rallied on Monday to levels close to $70,000. Generally, investors find price surges to be exciting, so it’s not unusual to see an uptick in speculative interest alongside them. “Leverage expanded as price tested $69.4k,” noted the analytics firm. “This was consistent with speculators betting on a $70k breakout that didn’t materialize.” While the breakout initially failed when the bets appeared, BTC has since picked itself back up. BTC Breaks $71,000, Shorts Face Mass Liquidations Following its pullback down toward $66,000, Bitcoin has regained bullish momentum, with its price now hitting the $71,200 mark. The below chart showcases how the cryptocurrency’s trajectory has looked. The result of this rally has been that derivatives market traders have faced a significant amount of liquidations . As data from CoinGlass shows, more than $210 million in BTC-related contracts have been flushed during the last 24 hours. Since the liquidations were largely triggered by a price surge, it’s not surprising to see that short contracts made up for most of the liquidations (around $159 million). Ethereum , the second largest cryptocurrency, has also rallied inside this window, but there has been a large gulf between its liquidations and BTC’s, implying the latter is currently the center of market speculation at the moment.