Bitcoin cleared $80,000 for the first time since spring
Bitcoin crossed $80,000 on August 25, its first print above that mark in three months, and finished the month roughly 27% higher. The Bitcoin rally that dragged the price out of a six-week range under $67,000 to an intraday high of $81,265 looked like conviction coming back into the market. Most of the buying was not a choice.
By the close of the week before, more than $4 billion in bearish positions had been liquidated. Bloomberg logged a record $2.7 billion in short liquidations on August 19 alone, the day the range broke. CoinDesk counted roughly $3 billion cleared as the price topped $71,000, then another billion the session it passed $75,000. This was forced buying stacked on forced buying, the kind of move that packs its gains into short violent windows and then has nothing left to run on once the shorts are gone.
The buyback that moved it starts September 9
The catalyst everyone named was a Treasury decision to expand its purchases of longer-dated government debt. Read the fine print and the timing gets awkward. The liquidity-support buybacks double to $4 billion per operation from $2 billion, and they run from September 9 through November 4. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the pace could go higher. None of it has happened yet.
So the market priced a bond-market plumbing change weeks before the first operation, off a cash balance most crypto traders had never watched. The Treasury General Account now holds about $950 billion, against a $550 billion to $600 billion target under the prior administration. The 30-year yield touched 5.337% before the announcement, its highest since 2007, then eased toward 5.18%. Bitcoin and gold both caught a bid on the same headlines, the old debasement reflex that treats a wall of new dollar liquidity as a reason to own scarce things.
How the squeeze built through the week
| Date (ET) | Price milestone | Shorts wiped out |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 19 | Six-week range breaks | $2.7 billion, a record day |
| Aug 20 | Tops $71,000 | About $3 billion cumulative |
| Aug 21 | Tops $75,000 | Another $1 billion |
| Aug 25 | High of $81,265 | Rejected at the 50-week average |
A familiar line stopped the run near $81,000
The top was not a coincidence. Bitcoin's 50-week moving average sat at $81,085 on Tuesday, and the intraday high of $81,265 tagged it almost to the dollar before the price slid back toward $79,000 the next day. That average has capped earlier attempts to break higher, and it held again. A Bitcoin rally built on covering rather than fresh demand tends to stall exactly where the last sellers are waiting.
Spot Bitcoin funds did take in real money alongside the move, more than $2.5 billion across six straight days of inflows through August 24, with $337.56 million arriving on the 24th. Yet total ETF assets jumped from $78.67 billion to $98.56 billion in a single week. Most of that gap is price, not new deposits, the same distortion that showed up when the funds grew $23 billion and only $2.6 billion was new cash.
For now the Bitcoin rally rests on two things that do not usually hold a price up for long: a technical ceiling it just failed to clear, and a Treasury operation that has not run a single time. Whether real spot demand shows up to replace the squeezed shorts before September 9 is what decides whether $80,000 holds.
