Midterm Short Squeeze: $378M of Shorts Liquidated in an Hour as ETFs Kept Selling

The midterm short squeeze took Bitcoin from a seven-week low of $75,618 to $81,105 in less than a day, and the forced buying did most of the work. In a single hour on November 4, as the US session opened, CoinGlass counted $378.09M of short liquidations across crypto, 81.1% of all forced closures in that window, according to crypto.news. The question for anyone trading the follow-through is simple: who is still buying once the shorts are gone?

The early read is not encouraging for bulls. Bitfinex analysts said the gains came mainly from short covering and that fresh spot buyers had not joined the bounce, per Bitcoin.com News. That is the kind of rally orderflow is built to test.

How the midterm short squeeze unfolded

The move started with a flush in the other direction. Bitcoin fell to $75,618 on Bitstamp into the Tuesday daily close as results showed Democrats taking control of both the House and the Senate, Cointelegraph reported. That low was the weakest print since September 16 and landed almost exactly on the 50-week simple moving average at $75,733. CoinGlass data in the same report showed $288M of long liquidations over 24 hours.

Kelly Ye, head of research at Talos, told Cointelegraph that BTC moved about 1.7% after the polls closed, close to the roughly 1.8% the options market had priced. In other words, the election itself was not the surprise. The surprise was positioning.

Once price reclaimed $78,000 and then $80,000 at the US open, the shorts that had piled in on the breakdown became fuel. CoinGlass figures cited by crypto.news show $466.33M of total liquidations in one hour, $501.42M over four hours and $914.84M over 24 hours, with $554.81M of that on the short side across 117,560 traders. Bitcoin alone accounted for $396.18M of the 24-hour total, 75.9% of it shorts. The largest single liquidation was a $38M ETH-USDT position on HTX.

Bitcoin open interest went into the move near a two-month high

The setup explains the speed. Aggregate Bitcoin futures open interest reached 701,548 BTC on November 3, the highest since late September, according to the Bitfinex Alpha report cited by Bitcoin.com News. The same report put annualized perpetual funding near 11%.

Rising open interest into a falling price usually means new shorts are opening, not longs closing. When that book gets squeezed, the buying is mechanical: liquidation engines market-buy to close positions, and late shorts cover manually to avoid the same fate. The result is a vertical candle that looks like demand but is mostly inventory being returned.

The useful check after a squeeze is what open interest does next. If OI drops sharply while price holds, the short book has been cleaned out and the move has to be carried by new money. If OI rebuilds quickly on the way up, fresh longs are chasing with borrowed size, and the next liquidation cluster sits below price instead of above it.

Short covering without spot: the ETF and CVD picture

Spot demand is where the story gets thin. US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $1.16B of outflows over three sessions, the largest since late June, and BlackRock's IBIT lost $405.3M on November 2, its biggest daily outflow this year, per Bitfinex data reported by crypto.news. Bitcoin.com News added that ongoing ETF withdrawals have pushed 2026 aggregate net flows marginally negative.

This is where cumulative volume delta earns its place. CVD tracks the running difference between market buys and market sells. A squeeze driven by liquidations shows up as a burst of aggressive buying in perp CVD that spot CVD does not match. A rally with real spot demand shows both lines rising together, and keeps rising after the liquidation spike fades.

Bitfinex also flagged that the support below $77,000 rests on derivatives positioning rather than spot accumulation, and that only about 353,000 BTC changed hands between $75,000 and $77,000, according to Bitcoin.com News. Thin volume at a level means few holders with a cost basis to defend there.

The levels the squeeze left behind

Three zones now matter. Above price, holders acquired 2.26M BTC between $81,000 and $85,500, and Bitfinex marked $84,000 to $85,500 as a potential area for breakeven selling, per crypto.news. A squeeze that runs into a wall of holders waiting to get out at cost tends to stall.

Below price, Bitfinex's November 2 report said spot bids between $78,000 and $79,000 grew to about $42M from $24M in mid-October, while bids at $80,000 had not been replaced. That leaves a gap between the current price and the nearest visible spot support.

The line Bitfinex highlighted is a daily settlement below $75,839, which it said could expose a liquidity pocket between $70,000 and $75,000, per Bitcoin.com News. The same report noted that options positioning ahead of the CPI release showed more than twice as many puts as calls, so the hedging bid is still skewed to the downside.

What to watch on Hyperliquid orderflow this week

The cleanest tell is divergence. If BTC grinds toward $84,000 while perp CVD flattens and spot ETF flows stay negative, the move is running on fumes and the shorts that got squeezed will reload higher. If spot CVD starts leading perp CVD and open interest rebuilds slowly, the squeeze has handed over to real buyers.

Watch funding too. Annualized funding near 11% is not extreme, but if it climbs while open interest rebuilds, longs are paying up to hold a rally that spot has not confirmed. That is the setup that produced the long liquidations on the way down to $75,618.

On Buildix, the BTC pair view puts CVD, open interest, funding and VPIN on one screen for Hyperliquid's BTC market, and the liquidation map shows where the next cluster of forced orders sits relative to $78,000 and $84,000. That is the data that separates a squeeze from a trend.

The midterm result was priced within a tenth of a percent by options. What was not priced was how crowded the short side had become. Once that inventory is returned, the market has to find a buyer that is not a liquidation engine, and the ETF tape says that buyer has not shown up yet.