The largest crypto by market cap touched an intraday high of $69,749 Wednesday and was recently trading near $68,689, up 9.3% on the week per Bitcoin price data on Bitstamp. The gain extends a recovery that has now pulled Bitcoin roughly 19% off the $57,735 swing low marked on the chart, though it remains well below the record above $126,000 set in October 2025. The rally is running over a pile of dead short positions.
CoinGlass's Total Liquidations panel shows $1.14 billion in short bets wiped out across the crypto market in the last hour, out of $1.22 billion in total liquidations for the period. Bitcoin accounts for $677.64 million of that hourly figure on CoinGlass's heatmap, with Ethereum ($422.90 million) and Solana ($37.88 million) making up most of the rest. A liquidation happens when an exchange force-closes a leveraged position because the trader's collateral can't cover the loss.
A short is a bet that the price of a given asset will fall. When Bitcoin jumps instead, those shorts go underwater fast, and the exchange sells them to limit the damage. The forced buy-backs push price up further, which trips the next layer of shorts.
That feedback loop is a short squeeze. That hourly short-liquidation total already covers roughly 87% of the past 24 hours' short liquidations, which stand at $1.31 billion across 112,004 traders, CoinGlass data shows, with the largest single order a $32.18 million ETH position wiped out on Bitget. Traders who bet against these assets by borrowing and selling them are now being forced to buy back at a loss—a scramble that itself pushes prices higher.
That mechanic is called a short squeeze, and it's become a familiar pattern in 2026's choppy bear-market rallies. A similar setup played out in April, when Bitcoin's jump above $75,000 liquidated more than $600 million in a single day, most of it short positions caught flat-footed by a sudden risk-on shift. Wednesday's rally comes hours ahead of a White House meeting where President Trump is expected to sit down with SEC Chair Paul Atkins, CFTC Chair Michael Selig, and executives from Coinbase, Ripple, and Kalshi to discuss crypto market-structure rules.
The Federal Reserve's July meeting minutes are also due out later Wednesday, with traders paring back bets on a rate hike that had topped 80% odds earlier this year, according to prediction-market pricing. Spot Bitcoin ETFs are helping too, turning net positive again this week after a stretch of outflows. Skybridge Capital's Anthony Scaramucci said the bounce shows Bitcoin's bear market is nearly done, arguing the asset's roughly 55% drawdown from its high is milder than prior cycles.
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