Short Positions Against Ethereum Reach Record Highs on Bitfinex

The cryptocurrency markets posted some slight gains on Friday after seeing a massive selloff on Thursday that sent many altcoins down by more than 10% and pushed Bitcoin to its range support at $6,200.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading up slightly on the 24-hour chart, with a current price of just over $6,300. Friday’s slight recovery has been led by XRP, which is up over 4% at a current price of $0.426, off its daily lows of $0.38.

Many people attributed the Thursday drop to a massive sell-off in global equities, disproving the notion that Bitcoin is a gold 2.0 that is immune from traditional retail market swings.

One analyst at Element Digital Asset Management, Thejas Nalval, disagrees with this notion, explaining to MarketWatch that:

“There’s a narrative that the crypto market was simply falling in lockstep with the equity markets, which are slowly entering into correction zones. We believe this move in cryptocurrencies had nothing to do with the stock market.”

He added that pricing data shows otherwise.

“Evidence has shown that there have been little correlation between global stock indexes and the price of Bitcoin. Nor does Bitcoin move on economic data,” he said.

Traders Betting Against Ethereum Amidst Persisting Bear Market

Despite a general recovery, Ethereum is lagging behind many of its peers, down nearly 2% on the 24-hour chart, currently trading at $198, slightly off its daily lows of $190.

Ethereum’s weak performance over the past couple of months has led short positions on the cryptocurrency to stack up to new highs.

Data on cryptocurrency exchange, Bitfinex, shows that there are currently over 300 thousand open short positions for ETH, worth a combined $60 million. Some analysts attribute ETH’s weakness to ICO’s who fundraised using ETH selling their positions due to fear of further losses.

Over the past year, Ethereum is down nearly 90% from its yearly highs, maxing out at around $1,400 in early January before plummeting to its year-to-date low of just over $180.

Despite its poor performance and massive amount of open short positions, the Ethereum blockchain development community is still incredibly active, with more than 1,000 major developers attending its recent hackathon at the ETH San Francisco event.

Also, the cryptocurrency’s network may soon see a hard fork – called Constantinople– which is intended to increase the cryptocurrency’s transactional efficiency and to lower transaction fees. The hard fork was supposed to occur on October 9th, but was delayed due to a Denial of Service attack (DoS).

Featured image from Shutterstock.