Bitcoin has surged roughly $10,000 over the past week, breaking above $77,000 and briefly touching $79,500 after the US Treasury doubled its long-dated bond buybacks. The move set a dollar record for short-side liquidations and follows a year in which the total crypto market cap has swung by hundreds of billions of dollars in rapid succession.
Bitcoin broke above $77,000 for the first time since May this week, extending a rally that briefly touched $79,500 and erased billions in short bets along the way. The move caps a year of extreme swings for crypto, including an October 2025 crash that wiped roughly $500 billion off the total market cap in a single session.
A year of whiplash
That October 2025 crash triggered $19 to $20 billion in liquidated derivatives positions, among the largest wipeouts in crypto history, as bitcoin's market cap absorbed around $110 billion in losses during certain weekly and daily drawdowns. The correction continued into 2026: a single-day loss of $110 billion was recorded on June 2, 2026, amid a broader market selloff unrelated to blockchain technology or protocol upgrades.
Then came the rebound. August 2026 trading included a single-day addition of $113 billion to the total market cap, with multi-day gains reaching between $170 billion and $291 billion. ETF inflows and short-covering were among the forces behind that bounce.
The Treasury trigger
The latest leg of the rally began after the US Treasury said it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations on longer-dated bonds, raising the maximum transaction size from $2 billion to $4 billion. The expanded program takes effect September 9 and runs through November 4. Bitcoin had spent six weeks pinned between $60,000 and $65,000 before the breakout.
Bernstein strategist Gautam Chhugani tied the move directly to the Treasury decision, saying the rally was "driven by Treasury's move to buyback bonds at the longer end of the yield curve."
Shorts pay the price
Once bitcoin broke above resistance near $70,000, automated liquidation engines force-closed roughly 172,108 short positions, with traders betting against bitcoin losing $3 billion in a single 24-hour window. That made it the largest short-side wipeout since 2021, surpassing an October 2025 record of $2.47 billion, as bitcoin gained 11% in the same window.
Traders are now watching whether bitcoin can clear $80,000, a level it last held in May.
Sources: Crypto Briefing, Bitcoin News
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