Bitcoin tops $75,000 in best week since 2024 on buyback plan

A Treasury buyback announcement, not an ETF headline, set off bitcoin's best week since 2024 and flipped sentiment from fear to greed in a day.

Bitcoin rose 20% in seven days to above $75,000, its best week since March 2024, after the US Treasury doubled its long-duration bond buyback program. Ethereum climbed alongside it, and total crypto market capitalization returned above $2.5 trillion.

"Forty-six to seventy-two in two days sounds like leverage and momentum, not real conviction," Rick Cramer, Head of Analytics at SimpleSwap, said. "True conviction builds over weeks. This move happened before the slower data could even catch up, and moves that fast often unwind just as quickly."

About $3 billion in short positions were liquidated in the day after the announcement, and each forced liquidation fed more buying. The Fear & Greed Index jumped from 46 to 62 in a single day, then climbed to 72 by Friday. Funding rates, what leveraged traders pay to hold a long position on perpetual futures, hit a 20-month high this week.

The policy itself doesn't take effect until September 9 and runs through November 4, so no Treasury cash has moved yet. Whether this is the start of a new leg or another sharp bounce will not be clear for more than a week.

The trigger

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled the size of the department's long-duration bond buybacks, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. Long-bond yields, which had climbed to a near two-decade high after months of weak demand for 30-year debt, dropped sharply within minutes. Bessent added fuel on Thursday, telling CNBC the eventual buyback total could exceed $4 billion.

Traders who had shorted bitcoin, positioned for tighter conditions, got caught wrong-footed. More than 130,000 traders were liquidated globally within 24 hours, with total liquidations reaching $1.23 billion, of which short positions accounted for $1.05 billion, per CoinMarketCap. XRP surged 15% and Ethereum climbed 4% in the same session.

Four numbers, not the price

Funding rates hit a 20-month high this week. Elevated funding has appeared right before most of bitcoin's sharper pullbacks over the past two years, because it shows the rally is increasingly running on borrowed money rather than fresh buyers.

Spot ETF flows tell a cleaner story. After a rough first half of the year, flows turned positive again in July and stayed positive into August. Large holders kept adding through the drawdown and haven't stopped through the bounce, a different kind of buying than retail chasing a green candle after the fact.

The Fear & Greed Index told its own version: 46 on Wednesday, 62 by Thursday, 72 by Friday. A reading in the 70s this early in a move has historically been more of a caution flag than a confirmation, since it leaves less room for the rally to keep surprising anyone.

The regulatory backdrop

The rally also lands in a busier regulatory calendar than crypto has had in years. The White House hosted a digital-asset summit this month. The SEC has proposed a dedicated "Regulation Crypto Assets" framework with tailored exemptions for token issuers, and stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act are due by November. President Trump met with crypto industry executives at the White House, including representatives from Coinbase, Payward, and Blockchain.com, and urged Congress to pass the CLARITY Act before the September 15 deadline.

Where execution comes in

For anyone moving assets this week rather than watching from the sidelines, volatility changes the mechanics of execution as much as the price. Spreads widen. Slippage on manually routed trades gets worse.

SimpleSwap, a self-custodial swap aggregator, doesn't hold customer funds between transactions. Every trade moves wallet-to-wallet, with pricing pulled in real time from more than 20 liquidity providers across centralized and decentralized sources. The platform supports more than 2,800 assets and over 3.2 million trading pairs through a single interface.

"Nobody really thinks about routing infrastructure when the market is calm. That is exactly when you do not need to," Stefan Lauer, Head of Infrastructure at SimpleSwap, said. "A week like this is what puts it to the test. Liquidity thins in some places, and prices can move by the minute rather than the hour. The system either finds the best price across dozens of sources in real time, or it does not. That is not a market call. It is an engineering one."

Whether this is the start of a new leg or just another sharp bounce will not be clear for more than a week. What happened this week was real either way, and it moved fast enough that anyone waiting for certainty probably missed most of it.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.