- There was a decisive shift in favor of stablecoin-margined BTC contracts.
- Owing to BTC’s latest losses, brief place merchants swung into motion.
Bitcoin’s [BTC] futures market has exhibited speedy development over time, making it probably the most most popular crypto derivatives devices amongst institutional traders. Futures knowledge is steadily used to forecast future BTC value actions and achieve a greater understanding of market sentiment.
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Distinguished on-chain analyst Will Clemente took to social platform Twitter to spotlight a somewhat fascinating development rising within the BTC futures panorama. Utilizing Glassnode’s knowledge, the researcher drew consideration to the regular decline within the variety of crypto-collateralized open BTC futures contracts over the past two years.

Supply: Glassnode
As evident within the graph, the share of crypto-margined contracts fell from 70% in the course of the peak of the historic 2021 bull market, to simply 23% as of 10 August. The main takeaway from these findings was a decisive shift in favor of stablecoin-margined contracts.
How does it matter?
It’s fundamental information that futures contracts enable merchants to invest on Bitcoin value actions with out holding the asset. Merchants within the futures market typically have two kinds of crypto derivatives at their disposal – crypto-collateralized and stablecoin-collateralized contracts.
Crypto-collateralized or coin-margined contracts are advantageous for long-term traders since they’re settled within the underlying cryptocurrency, on this case Bitcoin. Because of this they’ll proceed to HODL with out having to transform their property into stablecoins.
However, stablecoin-margined contracts are settled in stablecoins like Tether [USDT]. They’re principally put to make use of by short-term merchants as they provide a buffer in opposition to wild market swings.
In consequence, the push to safe leverages utilizing stablecoin collateral instructed a decrease probability of liquidation cascades. Liquidation cascades occur when a sudden bullish or bearish occasion results in pressured liquidation of positions, and the cascading impact plunges your complete market.
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Bearish sentiments kick in
Bitcoin pulled again to $29,417 at press time, after climbing to $30,000 on 9 August, knowledge from CoinMarketCap confirmed. The decline profoundly influenced the methods of merchants within the futures market.
In keeping with Coinglass, merchants seeking to revenue from value losses outpaced these gunning from bullish value strikes. The Longs/Shorts Ratio tilted in favor of bearish leveraged merchants.

Supply: Coinglass