Ether broke above $2,000 for the first time in over two months after the U.S. Treasury said it would double bond buybacks to $4 billion, dragging Zcash, XRP, and Solana higher alongside it. The rally also triggered more than $2 billion in short-position liquidations across crypto derivatives markets in 24 hours.
Ether broke above $2,000 on Wednesday, its first move past that level in more than two months, after the U.S. Department of the Treasury said it would double bond buybacks to $4 billion. The token rocketed to an intraday peak of $2,112 before pulling back to trade just under $2,090.
Treasury buyback news lights the fuse
The unexpected announcement snapped ether out of a slump: the token had languished below $1,900 since Aug. 8, except for brief moments when buying pressure pushed it through that threshold. The move also lifted the token's market cap from under $230 billion to $251 billion. Bitcoin, meanwhile, climbed to just short of the $70,000 mark. As a result, the combined market capitalization of altcoins climbed above $1 trillion for the first time in nearly a month.
Zcash, XRP, and Solana ride the wave
Privacy coin Zcash outperformed the broader market, climbing from just over $503 to peak at $557. The move lifted its market cap to $9.3 billion. Meanwhile, XRP and Solana each gained more than 6%. Stellar's XLM rose 7.5% too. Not every token joined in: LEO fell 2% and TRON slipped 0.7%.
Michaël van de Poppe, chief investment officer at MN Fund, called the move a "phenomenal breakout" for ether. He added that holding above $2,000 could open a path toward $2,250, a $2,465 high, and potentially $2,900, and that a higher high would mark the end of the bear market.
Elsewhere, Hyperliquid's HYPE token rose 23.1% to around $72.19 in the 24 hours to Aug. 19, a gain that ranked alongside ether and Solana among the day's strongest performers in the crypto top 100. Solana's advance, however, traced back to developments within its own network rather than a single market event.
Short sellers get squeezed
The rally hit bearish traders hard. More than $2.16 billion in short positions was liquidated across derivatives markets in 24 hours, according to Coinglass data. That accounted for more than 90% of the roughly $2.37 billion in total liquidations. More than 148,000 traders were caught on the wrong side of the move.
Bitcoin short liquidations alone reached around $1.20 billion, against roughly $40 million in long liquidations, a 30-to-1 ratio that exposed how one-sided bearish bets had become. Total open interest across exchanges had exceeded $127 billion heading into the short squeeze, leaving the setup for another cascade in place if positioning stays this skewed.
Sources: Bitcoin News, Crypto Briefing, Crypto Briefing
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