Bitcoin Topped $77,000 and Booked Its Best Week Since March…

The bitcoin price pushed past $75,000 this week and topped $77,000 on Friday, up about 20% over the five sessions. That would be its best week since March 2024, according to Bloomberg, which put the intraday high at $75,740 before the latest leg higher. After six weeks pinned in a tight range, the move was violent, and it raises the question a Friday reader actually has: is this the start of something, or a squeeze that ran out of sellers?

FinanceFeeds covered the daily mechanics as they happened, first the Treasury-driven jump toward $70,000, then Bitcoin topping $72,000 as a multi-billion-dollar short squeeze fueled the rally. This is the weekly wrap: what actually moved the bitcoin price, and what would tell you whether it holds. Three forces did the work, and they arrived within days of each other.

Where the Week Ended for BTC

Bitcoin spent roughly six weeks trapped between about $62,000 and $66,900, with volatility grinding down to multi-year lows. That calm is what set up the violence: a tight range with a thick band of short-liquidation levels stacked just above it. When the price finally broke, per CoinDesk, it cleared $71,000 for the first time since June and kept going, closing the week near $77,000.

Bitcoin’s market value now sits around $1.5 trillion, though that is still roughly 40% below its October 2025 record above $126,000. The scale of the weekly gain is real; so is the distance left to the highs.

Driver One: The Treasury Turned On the Liquidity Tap

The spark was macro, not crypto, as US Treasury liquidity expectations shifted after the government announced a significant increase in liquidity-support bond buybacks. The US Treasury said it would at least double its liquidity-support bond buybacks in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors, raising the maximum from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, effective September 9 and running through the November refunding quarter. The stated reason was strong dealer participation in existing operations.

Buying back long-dated bonds pulls their yields down, and the 30-year yield had just touched 5.337%, its highest since 2007, the level FinanceFeeds examined in its breakdown of the bond selloff repricing the AI trade. Lower long-term yields and a softer dollar push investors toward risk assets, and Bitcoin, sitting oversold at the bottom of its range, was primed to respond.

Driver Two: The Short Squeeze, and What the Number Really Measures

The macro spark hit a market leaning heavily the wrong way. Traders had spent six weeks betting the range would hold, which left a wall of short positions clustered just above the market. Once the price pushed through, those shorts were forced to buy back, which lifted the price, which triggered the next tier of liquidations, a self-reinforcing loop.

Here is where precision matters, because the headline figure is easy to misread. The widely cited $2.74 billion in short liquidations on August 19 was crypto-wide, across all tokens. Bitcoin alone accounted for about $1.42 billion of that, according to CoinGlass data. It was one of the larger single-day short-liquidation events in CoinGlass’s records, but those records only begin in 2021, so it is not an all-time crypto record; the October 2025 crash was far larger. The squeeze kept running into Friday, with roughly another $1 billion in shorts wiped out over the following 24 hours.

Investor Takeaway

Driver Three: Washington Stacked Its Signals Into One Week

The third force was regulatory, and several signals landed at once. The SEC published its Regulation Crypto Assets proposal on August 18, which would create tailored exemptions including one allowing capital raises up to $75 million over 12 months plus a decentralization safe harbor. The next day, President Trump hosted crypto executives at the White House and urged Congress to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, an event FinanceFeeds tracked as Circle added billions in market value on the meeting.

Adding to that, CFTC, whose new advisory committee held its first meeting that same week, is separately weighing rules that could bring leveraged crypto trading back to US exchanges. None of these alone moved the bitcoin price, but together they shifted the backdrop from hostile to accommodative in a matter of days.

What Would Disconfirm the Bull Read

The honest answer to “regime change or squeeze” is that the data does not confirm a regime change yet. Glassnode’s Realized Profit/Loss Ratio, a gauge of whether a recovery reflects genuine conviction, reads 0.75, well below the 2 level the firm treats as evidence of a real shift; until it clears that, Glassnode says the move should be treated as a local rally rather than a turn. The tell to watch is whether spot demand replaces forced buying once the liquidations are exhausted.

There is also a concrete near-term risk. CoinDesk quotes macro strategist Mark Connors arguing that near-term price risk is “predicated on Clarity,” and that Bitcoin could fall back from the low $70,000s if the Clarity Act does not progress by around September 15. As a live sentiment gauge, the Polymarket market on where the bitcoin price ends August puts the odds of reaching $77,500 at roughly 92% and $80,000 at about 57%, with more than $13 million in volume, a market that has climbed all week alongside the price but still puts real doubt on the next leg.

Investor Takeaway