Bitcoin (BTC) Futures Open Interest Tops $17 Billion, December 2021 Futures Trading $10K Above Spot Price

Earlier today, Bitcoin (BTC) topped $50,000 levels hitting its new all-time high along with stablecoin reserves at the exchanges moving to all-time highs. The world’s largest cryptocurrency now is just short of becoming the first trillion-dollar crypto asset.

Interestingly, the Bitcoin derivatives market has seen significant action with the aggregated open interest (across all exchanges) for Bitcoin Futures skyrocketing to more than $17 billion. As reported by CoinGape, the Bitcoin funding rates have peaked out signaling too much greed. However, it is strongly backed by the spot demand.

This happens as last week around $450 million worth of futures short positions were liquidated in the market after Elon Musk’s Tesla announced $1.5 billion worth of BTC purchases.

As per on-chain data provider Skew analytics, the December 2021 Bitcoin Futures are trading at $10K above the spot price.

December #bitcoin futures are trading $10k above spot price pic.twitter.com/0HwhXb5v2j

— skew (@skewdotcom) February 16, 2021

On the other hand, the Bitcoin (BTC) supply at the exchanges has been dropping at a very fast rate. The Bitcoin (BTC) liquidity at the exchanges has dropped by 2.1% since the beginning of 2021. Nearly 32,572 Bitcoins worth $1.57 billion have left exchanges so far in 2021.

Bitcoin Miners Have Eased Off Selling

With a strong rally in the BTC price so far, miners have been realizing profits. However, Glassnode data shows that even the miners now have eased off their selling. It could mean that miners have already realized some healthy profits to continue with their operations.

Or, miners are still expecting BTC to climb higher prices with American corporates showing interest. In the below graph by Glassnode, we can see that the net miner sell-offs for Bitcoin have significantly cooled down in the month of February.

Also, Glassnode node that old holders of Bitcoin (BTC) have taken advantage of the market movement while making their supply mobile and selling into the move. The on-data provider cites two major metrics – Average Spent Output Lifespan indicator (ASOL) & Coin Days Destroyed (CDD) –  to verify that old coins are on the move. In its recent report, Glassnode writes:

“Both the CDD and ASOL indictaors demonstrate that older coins have been on the move since BTC/USD price was around $12k, and have been moving at an increasing pace. This behaviour slowed during the consolidation in January, and has started ramping back up this week”.

At press time, BTC has held its position at $49,200 levels.