Bitcoin is up $16,000 in a week: a squeeze, a signal, or both?
Bitcoin had its second largest dollar move ever last week, the last time was exiting the 2022 bear market.
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Bitcoin went from consolidating in the low-$60,000s to briefly touching $79,500 in the space of about four trading days. That's roughly a 24% weekly gain, one of the largest weekly advances in Bitcoin's history, and the biggest since early in the last bull cycle. Ether outran it on a percentage basis. Gold, made a move the previous week, caught a fresh bid. And Zcash led a broader privacy-coin rally that's become one of 2026's more persistent side stories.
None of it happened in isolation. Here's the chain of events, what's confirmed versus what's internet noise, and what it might actually mean.
Treasury, not crypto policy
The move didn't start with a crypto headline. It started with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubling the pace of long-dated bond buybacks, from roughly $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, beginning in September, explicitly to support liquidity in the long end of the curve after yields had been grinding higher. Call it what you want, but the mechanics rhyme with yield curve control: the Treasury stepping in to cap borrowing costs as issuance keeps climbing. The dollar sold off on the news, and Bitcoin ripped through $68,000 straight after the buyback was announced.
That's the part of this rally that matters most for the medium-term thesis, and I'll come back to it.
The "call it what you want" caveat is doing some work above, so it's worth being precise about why the YCC comparison isn't just rhetorical flourish. The Fed's own balance sheet is already heavily concentrated in exactly the maturity bucket the Treasury is now targeting with buybacks: the Fed owns more than half, $540 billion of the $1.028 trillion outstanding, of coupon Treasuries maturing in 10-15 years. Every other maturity bucket sits at 10-28% Fed ownership; the 10-15 year bucket is more than triple the next-highest. That's not a coincidence of the Fed's QE-era purchasing pattern resolving itself, it's a single maturity segment where one buyer already dominates the float, and where the Treasury is now layering *additional* official-sector buying on top via the buyback program. Two arms of the same government, both leaning on the same slice of the curve, in the same direction, at the same time. If that's not yield curve control in substance, it's hard to say what the practical difference is.
White House reconfirms commitment to crypto
Later the same day, Trump hosted crypto executives alongside SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig. Two things came out of that meeting that moved price:
- Trump pushed Congress to pass "a fair version" of the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would formally divide SEC/CFTC oversight of digital assets. It's genuinely stalled, a Senate cloture vote is pencilled in for mid-September. In a post on X, Brian Armstrong said Trump's message was clear: the White House was committed to passing the CLARITY Act. He also said Atkins and Selig were aligned and that "the entire industry is ready to get this across the finish line."
- Trump said Selig is "working very hard" to bring Hyperliquid (HYPE), the offshore perpetuals exchange that currently blocks US users, onshore under a compliant framework. HYPE spiked as much as 25% intraday on the line alone, despite zero detail on what that would actually require.
A genuine short squeeze
This is where the move stopped being a policy story and became a positioning story. The rally accelerated into the largest liquidation event of 2026, north of $3 billion wiped out from a Bitcoin futures open interest base of roughly $49 billion. That's the mechanical engine behind the back half of the move from $72,000 to near $79,500: forced buying, not fresh conviction.
How big was this, really?
Raw percentage terms flatter almost every rally in a volatile asset. The more useful lens — courtesy of Jamie Coutts (CMT, Helios Analytics), is to volatility-adjust it. Bitcoin has been in a structural volatility downtrend for years, which means a given percentage move today represents a much larger statistical outlier than the same move would have five years ago.
On that basis, last week's two-day move ranks as the **fifth-largest since 2018**, a 4.4-sigma event. Only five episodes have topped it since 2018. Both the 2018 and 2019 major lows saw a volatility squeeze followed by a similarly outsized impulse move higher, and in both cases it marked a cycle inflection rather than a bounce within a downtrend.
The forward statistics back that framing, with the obvious caveat that 14 completed historical analogs is a small sample: Bitcoin has traded higher more than 70% of the time in the 30, 90 and 180 days following moves like this, against something closer to a coin flip for a random trading day. Median forward returns are also meaningfully higher than the random-day baseline. Directionally suggestive, not proof.
Debasement trade, round two
The part of this story I think matters most for a macro audience is how uniformly the "hard asset" trade traded together. Gold, already up sharply in 2026 on dollar weakness, Fed-independence concerns and record central-bank buying, caught a fresh bid on the same dollar-debasement logic driving Bitcoin. Total crypto market cap added more than $150 billion in a single session, crossing $2.45 trillion. And privacy coins, led by Zcash (+60% YTD), extended a run that's arguably been the standout niche trade of the year, as the same investors chasing non-sovereign, hard-supply assets rotate into ones that also can't be surveilled.
That's not a coincidence. It's the same trade wearing three different wrappers: a hedge against a Treasury that's now visibly leaning on markets to keep a lid on its own borrowing costs.
The smart money was already positioned
What makes last week's move harder to dismiss as pure momentum is that some of macro's most-watched names were leaning this way before the rally, not chasing it after the fact.
Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office disclosed roughly $88 million in new crypto-adjacent positions in its Q2 13F: a $64.7 million stake in Bitcoin miner Bitdeer, and a $23.1 million stake in Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), a digital-asset-treasury vehicle that exists purely to accumulate and stake HYPE. The PURR position is small relative to Duquesne's book, but the signal matters more than the size, Citadel, Jane Street, BlackRock and State Street all built out similar HYPE-adjacent exposure over the same quarter, well before Trump's Hyperliquid comment sent the token spiking.
Ray Dalio spent the back half of the week making the debasement case as bluntly as he ever has. In a Friday LinkedIn post, timed to land right after Bessent's buyback announcement, the Bridgewater founder said the government's fiscal position looks close to an inflection point, floated a US debt crisis arriving in roughly three years, and told investors to go underweight bonds while holding 10-15% of a portfolio in gold plus "a bit" of Bitcoin. It's not a new allocation for Dalio (he's talked about a ~1-2% Bitcoin position before), but the timing and the framing — explicitly tying it to the Treasury's own intervention, is new.
Paul Tudor Jones' Tudor Investment added to its BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) position in Q2, up 18.9% to 688,529 shares (~$22.9 million), the first quarter-on-quarter increase after a year of steady selling that had taken the position 91% below its late-2024 peak. He simultaneously cut his IBIT call options by 85%, which reads less like a leveraged momentum bet and more like a shift toward plain spot exposure. Worth the caveat that a 13F is a stale, quarter-old snapshot as of June 30 ,it tells you where conviction was building before this week's rally, not what any of these three did with it afterward.
None of these are single-handedly the reason Bitcoin ran from $63,000 to $79,500. But they're evidence the "debasement trade" framing isn't just a crypto-Twitter narrative bolted on after the fact, some of the most closely watched allocators in macro were already leaning into gold and Bitcoin, for overlapping reasons, ahead of the week that made the trade obvious to everyone else.
It's time to start dollar-cost averaging in
Put all of that together and our read is that this isn't a trade to watch from the sidelines anymore.
The move has now held for several days rather than round-tripping a short squeeze with a long squeeze, the initial spike to $79,500 had every hallmark of a short squeeze, but squeezes that fully retrace within a week look very different from ones that consolidate a large chunk of their gain, which is what's happened here. Historically, Bitcoin bear markets spend time grinding below the 200-day moving average, have averaged around 383 days across the three prior major cycles (410 days in 2013-15, 363 in 2017-18, 376 in 2021-22). Not only that but in each prior bear market a decisive break of that resistance is the signal, the trend has changed.
Layer the on-chain and technical picture on top and the signals are lining up rather than conflicting: realized-price and MVRV-style measures were flashing undervalued territory into the ~$57,000-$61,000 area that this cycle bottomed around, funding reset cleanly through the sell-off rather than staying stretched, and this price action cleared a well-defined downtrend line on the daily chart on the kind of volatility-adjusted thrust that has historically marked cycle inflections rather than counter-trend bounces.
Our own base case is that $57,000 was the cycle low. We're not calling for a straight line higher from here, there's real overhead supply into the low-$80,000s, long yields are creeping back up, and the "phony war" framing means the fiscal backdrop can stay unresolved for longer than feels comfortable. But probabilistically, waiting for confirmation in the form of a new all-time high means paying up for certainty that, historically, this asset has never offered. The people positioning ahead of this week's move, Druckenmiller, Dalio, Tudor Jones, weren't waiting for that confirmation either.
For anyone who's been sitting this one out waiting for a cleaner signal: this is that signal. Our view is that the moment to start dollar-cost averaging back into the market is now, not once Bitcoin is making headlines again at a new high.
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Ryan McMillin is the Chief Investment Officer and co-founder of Merkle Tree Capital, a specialist digital asset fund manager, managing the MTC Digital Asset Fund and the MTC Bitcoin and Gold Fund. With more than 20 years of experience across Australia and the U.K., Ryan has built his career in asset management, hedge funds and product innovation.
As CIO for the MTC Digital Asset Fund, Ryan has delivered exceptional returns for investor, including the best performing fund in Australia for FY24 and top 3 fund returns for CY23 and CY24 per AFR reporting
Before launching Merkle Tree Capital, Ryan held senior roles at leading firms including BlackRock, GAM, Coutts & Co., AMP Capital, Nemesis Asset Management, and Sarasin & Partners
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Ryan McMillin is the Chief Investment Officer and co-founder of Merkle Tree Capital, a specialist digital asset fund manager, managing the MTC Digital Asset Fund and the MTC Bitcoin and Gold Fund. With more than 20 years of experience across...
Expertise
Ryan McMillin is the Chief Investment Officer and co-founder of Merkle Tree Capital, a specialist digital asset fund manager, managing the MTC Digital Asset Fund and the MTC Bitcoin and Gold Fund. With more than 20 years of experience across...
Expertise
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