Short-sellers just got run over, and the liquidation data proves it. Bitcoin price (BTC USD) has punched through $80,000 for the first time since mid-May before retracing. It’s currently trading at $79,200, up 1.74% over the last 24 hours and sitting just below a 3-month peak most traders thought was still months away.
Bloomberg reports the breakout triggered billions in leveraged liquidations, a sign that shorts had gotten far too comfortable betting against BTC.
JUST IN: Bitcoin surges to $81,000 as $225,000,000 in shorts are liquidated from the crypto market in 10 minutes. pic.twitter.com/z6ULLseNjj
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) August 25, 2026
Desk notes peg the weekly gain at 23-26%, with Bitcoin reclaiming its 200-day moving average and briefly testing $82,000 before cooling off. A $2 billion jump in USDC supply and a $439 million wave of futures liquidations round out the picture. This looks like fresh institutional money entering, not just retail euphoria.
That backdrop matters for anyone tracking where capital rotates next, including the smaller, higher-beta corners of the market that tend to move once Bitcoin sentiment turns.
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Can Bitcoin Price Hit $85K This Week?
Bitcoin Price is sitting at $79,259 on the daily chart, and the vertical move that just happened over the past few days is one of the sharpest single-week recoveries on this entire chart, launching from $63,000 and pushing all the way to $81,255 before a slight pullback to current levels.
The $80,000 zone is now the immediate test, being the dotted line on the chart that has acted as a significant reference point throughout the year, and price is sitting right at it after the spike.
The move has the hallmarks of a short squeeze or macro catalyst-driven push rather than a gradual organic recovery, which means the follow-through question is the most important thing to watch right now because moves this vertical often need a cooling period before continuing.
The $82,000 to $84,000 range is the next meaningful resistance from the May peak, and above that $88,000 to $90,000 is where heavier supply sits from the February to March distribution zone.
On the downside, the $72,000 to $74,000 breakout zone is the first support that should hold on any retest, and a pullback there would actually be a healthy consolidation rather than a sign of failure as long as it holds.
The pattern of lower highs that dominated this chart from January through July has now been broken if this close holds, which is the first genuinely meaningful technical development in months.
$84,000 is the next real test of whether this move has legs or fades like the previous ones.
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Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as BTC Tests Key Levels
A move to $85,000 from here is roughly a 6% gain, solid, but not the kind of return that changes a portfolio. That math is exactly why traders with smaller allocations keep drifting toward earlier-stage infrastructure plays that sit on top of Bitcoin’s own rally rather than chase the asset itself at a trillion-dollar-plus market cap.
Enter Bitcoin Hyper (HYPER), marketed as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 to integrate a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), the same execution environment that gives Solana its speed, bolted onto Bitcoin’s security base. The presale has raised $33,080,369.89 at a current token price of $0.0136852, with staking rewards advertised at a high APY (exact rate undisclosed).
The pitch: solve Bitcoin’s slow transaction times and lack of programmability via a decentralized canonical bridge and low-latency execution layer, all while leaning on Bitcoin’s base-layer trust. More on how the mechanics work here.
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