Bitcoin Posts Best Week Since 2023 as $2.7B Short Squeeze Drives Price Near $80,000

Bitcoin posted its best week since March 2023, surging nearly 24% from Monday’s low to a Friday intraday high of $79,461, as a record wave of short liquidations turned an already-strong rally into a full squeeze.

The move began after six straight weeks of Bitcoin grinding sideways between $62,000 and $66,000, a stretch that had encouraged traders to build up bearish positions on the bet that the malaise would continue. When price broke out instead, those shorts became forced buyers: roughly $2.7 billion in short positions were liquidated as Bitcoin ran from the low $60,000s to just under $80,000, with over $1 billion unwound in a single hour on August 19 alone.

The rally had real macro fuel behind it, not just positioning. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the Treasury would at least double its long-term bond buyback program, pushing down long-end yields and boosting risk appetite broadly. That landed alongside renewed optimism around the stalled CLARITY Act and a White House meeting with crypto industry executives, giving traders a policy tailwind on top of the technical squeeze.

Spot ETF demand confirmed the move wasn’t just leverage unwinding. US spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in over $1 billion for the week, pushing August’s cumulative inflows to $2.07 billion, a new monthly high for the year, while combined Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF inflows hit $2.6 billion, the category’s strongest week since October 2025.

The scale of the squeeze is the real story here: a market that spent six weeks convinced the range would hold got unwound almost entirely by its own bearish bets once the range broke, a reminder that crowded positioning, not just news flow, can be the single biggest driver of a violent move in either direction.

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