Bitcoin held near $77,800 on Monday, pausing after a 24% weekly surge that was its best week in three years. The rally, sparked by a U.S. Treasury bond-buyback announcement, triggered over $3 billion in short liquidations, and traders are now watching this week's Jackson Hole symposium for the next catalyst.
Bitcoin traded around $77,800 on Monday morning, little changed since midnight UTC as markets digested one of the sharpest weekly rallies in years. The pause follows a week in which BTC surged roughly 24% from below $63,000, its best performance since March 2023.
A Treasury announcement cracked the range
The U.S. Treasury's decision to double buybacks of long-dated bonds cracked bitcoin's six-week trading range, triggering more than $3 billion in short liquidations in 24 hours. Equities lagged as crypto and gold rallied in tandem last week, with bullion adding around 0.8% Monday morning and sitting near record highs as Treasury Secretary Bessent's debt-management strategy continued to weigh on long-dated yields.
Bitcoin futures open interest declined to a two-month low of 715K BTC from the Aug. 18 high of 762K BTC, according to Coinglass data. That decline shows last week's surge was driven by spot buying and the unwinding of shorts rather than leverage traders taking outright bullish bets. Altcoins are broadly consolidating, with bitcoin dominance near 59.2% and the Altcoin Season index at 42/100, up slightly from 33 on Friday.
Analysts split on what comes next
Ahead of last week's move, exchange balances had fallen to multi-year lows with more than 80% of supply held by long-term holders, said Stephen Wundke, strategy and revenue director at Algoz. As spot buying pushed through $65,000 and then $70,000, short positions were closed out at scale, feeding automated market buys into a book already short of coins.
James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, framed it as a macro story rather than a crypto-specific one, writing that softer inflation and weaker payrolls have undermined the case for tightening. He expects the market to hold its range, with $80,000 an important upper boundary. Tim Sun, senior researcher at HashKey, told Decrypt the market appears to be forming a consensus around the bottom range, pointing to a deleveraged market, a weaker dollar and returning ETF flows.
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $606.29 million on Thursday, their biggest single-day haul since May 1, according to SoSoValue, extending the inflow streak to four sessions. According to Decrypt, Wundke described the week's move as "a textbook demonstration of supply illiquidity meeting a sudden demand shock".
Jackson Hole looms as the next test
Traders are now looking to this week's Jackson Hole symposium, which runs from Thursday to Saturday under the theme "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy." Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first keynote in the role Friday, ahead of the Fed's September 16 rate decision.
CME's FedWatch tool puts the chance of a rate hike at 38.4%, against 61.6% for no change, a sharp shift from a month ago when a hike was priced near 82%. Bernard Fisher, chief marketing officer at payments firm Oobit, described himself as cautiously bullish but would not rule out a bull trap, adding the question now is whether bitcoin can hold these levels once the hype settles down.
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