BTC soared above $18,000, reaching as high as $18,370 (on Bitstamp) in Thursday’s early morning EU trading session.The last time the cryptocurrency was trading at these prices was on December 14th.

This left a lot of short positions liquidated. In fact, over $200 million worth of leveraged shorts was liquidated in the past 24 hours alone, according to data from Coinglass. 

(By George Georgiev)