Bitcoin has ripped through a string of price milestones this week, climbing from roughly $62,300 to an intraday high of $79,500 and putting it on pace for its largest weekly gain since March 2023. The move added an estimated $412 billion to Bitcoin's market capitalization in just four days and pushed the asset past Meta in market-cap rankings, making it the 13th-largest asset in the world by that measure.
The catalyst was macro, not crypto-native. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department would at least double its long-dated bond buybacks, and President Trump met with crypto industry executives the same day — a combination that flipped trader positioning almost overnight and triggered a scramble to cover short bets across derivatives exchanges.
The largest short squeeze since 2021
More than $3 billion in leveraged short positions were liquidated on August 19 and 20 alone, according to derivatives trackers, making it the biggest concentrated short squeeze since November 2021. Nearly $2.5 billion of that came from bearish Bitcoin bets specifically, with roughly $4.5 billion wiped out across all crypto assets over three days. A live liquidation tracker maintained by CoinGlass shows the scale of forced buying that resulted as short sellers were squeezed out of their positions.
Analysts split on whether it's spot demand or forced buying
Not everyone agrees the rally reflects durable demand. A CryptoQuant analyst using the handle BorisD argued the week's gains were driven primarily by concentrated short liquidations on Binance futures rather than genuine spot buying, meaning the move could prove fragile if leveraged positioning resets. That view sits in tension with Pantera Capital's read that institutional positioning is genuinely reversing bullish, not just mechanically unwinding.
Strategy flips back into the black
The rally has also rescued corporate treasuries that had been sitting on paper losses for months. Michael Saylor's Strategy, which holds 840,447 BTC at an average cost basis of $75,385, moved back above that cost basis as Bitcoin cleared $75,613, and its unrealized position swelled further as Bitcoin pushed toward $78,000 — turning what had been a paper loss of roughly $9.9 billion earlier in the year into a multibillion-dollar unrealized gain.
Related: Bitcoin's Thin Supply Above $78K Opens Path to $84,569 Target
Whether this week's move holds will likely depend on which read is correct. If the CryptoQuant view is right and the rally was mostly short covering, a stabilization in funding rates could take momentum out of the market; if Pantera's smart-money thesis holds, the positioning shift could persist well beyond this week's liquidation cascade.
