Bitcoin hits $75,500 in Friday’s Asian session, a level it had not touched since May, with the weekly gain running close to 20%. Behind the move sits more than $4B of short positions liquidated across two days, including $3B on Thursday alone. That single-day figure is the largest in records going back to 2021. The trigger came from the US Treasury rather than from anything inside crypto.
Key Takeaways
- The price reached $75,500 on Friday morning, its highest mark since May.
- More than $4B of short positions were closed out across two sessions.
- The US Treasury doubled its long-dated debt buybacks starting September 9.
Three Billion Dollars of Short Positions Closed in One Session
Thursday’s number is the largest single day on record since data collection began in 2021. Three billion dollars of short positions were bought back involuntarily, and the two-day total runs past $4B.
The mechanism is ordinary enough. A short seller borrows to open a position larger than their capital covers, the market turns against them, and the venue closes the position before losses exceed the collateral. Every forced closure is a purchase, which adds upward pressure. The same cascade erased $1B of positions in May when US strikes hit Iran, running the other way.
On Friday morning another $222M of short positions went in a single hour. Thursday saw the price add more than 8% inside that same span, once resistance broke and forced buybacks went hunting for resting supply that had thinned out.
Six weeks of compression emptied at once. The market went through a comparable purge near $58,000 in June, on a far smaller scale. When Bitcoin hits a wall of stops this way, it says the positioning was lopsided rather than that the trend has turned.
The rest of the board followed. Ether added roughly 18% in a day toward $2,376, and Solana slipped back under $90 after a 17% weekly gain. Rotation of that speed usually points to leverage unwinding, not to fresh conviction spreading across assets.
The cascade started earlier than Thursday. Wednesday already carried $1.3B of Bitcoin liquidations once the Treasury headline crossed, and the combined altcoin market value pushed back above $1T on the same leg. What looked like three separate up days was one continuous unwind of the same short book, spread across three sessions and several venues.
That distinction matters for what comes next. A rally built on forced buying leaves no natural holder behind it, because the buyers were closing an obligation rather than opening a view. Nothing about this week rebuilt the bid, and the first genuine test arrives when the next wave of sellers meets a book with no trapped shorts left to squeeze.
Bessent’s Doubled Buybacks Bent the 30-Year Yield
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled the debt buyback program. The ceiling moves from $2B to at least $4B per operation across the 10-year to 30-year sectors, a decision laid out in the statement Treasury published on its liquidity support operations. The change takes effect September 9 and runs through November 4.
Rates responded immediately. The 30-year yield fell back from 5.34% toward the 5.19% to 5.24% band. Less pressure on the long end mechanically means more appetite for risk assets, and the price had already cleared $69,749 on Wednesday on that announcement alone.
The debt backdrop makes the intervention less routine than it looks. US public debt has passed $40T, and a ceiling raised by two billion dollars per operation does not touch that arithmetic. What it buys is liquidity on one specific stretch of the curve, for one refunding quarter.
Washington supplied a second push in the same week. At a White House event on Wednesday, Donald Trump urged Congress to move the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act forward, flanked by executives from Coinbase, Ripple and Robinhood. No text advanced and no vote was scheduled that day, so the contribution was one of tone rather than of law.
Stacking the two catalysts explains the violence of the move better than either one alone. A liquidity signal from Treasury and a political signal from the White House arrived within hours of each other, into a market carrying six weeks of accumulated short interest. The setup was primed well before the trigger, which is why an ordinary policy adjustment produced an extraordinary print.
This link between the Treasury calendar and crypto liquidity is not new. A $150B account rebuild threatened Bitcoin liquidity back in May, pointing the opposite way. The same lever works in both directions, which is exactly why the current relief deserves a date stamp rather than a narrative.
For a holder, the reading is simple. When Bitcoin hits new levels on a retreat in the 30-year yield, its price is being set on the US curve as much as on its own flows.
Also on Cryptonomic:
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- Bitcoin Jumps to $69,749 as Treasury Doubles Bond Buybacks
$5.3B in ETF Volume, With $4.4B at BlackRock Alone
Daily volume across listed products reached a record $5.3B, of which $4.4B sat at BlackRock. On net flows, spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $606M on August 20 and Ether funds $221M, following $517M the previous day.
That $517M figure carried its own signal before Thursday’s number topped it. It was the largest single-day intake in three and a half months, which places the institutional bid ahead of the squeeze rather than behind it. Allocators were adding while the short book was still intact, and the liquidation cascade then landed on a market already absorbing supply.
Volume and net flow tell different stories. Record volume signals arbitrage and rotation, while a positive net flow signals fresh allocation. Both climbed here, which gives the move a base the squeeze alone would not provide.
Available supply on trading venues explains the amplitude. Exchange reserves had already dropped to their lowest level since 2017, and a thin book turns an ordinary buy flow into a violent price gap.
Scale matters before anyone calls a reversal. Market value sits near $1.5T, roughly 40% below the October record set above $126,000. A 20% week erases a quarter of decline, not the year that produced it.
The next checkpoint is already on the calendar. The first enlarged buyback operations land on September 9, which leaves the market several weeks to test whether long-end yields hold their retreat without Treasury standing behind them. Whether Bitcoin hits higher ground from here depends far more on that answer than on the leverage that produced this week’s move.
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