✍🏻 Personal Perspective
🚨 $BTC rips through $69,500, over $1B in shorts liquidated in the past hour — short squeeze or bull run?
Spot spiked straight to around $69,500, with futures briefly running even higher, some exchanges printing above $70,000. Liquidations over the past hour hit roughly $1.4 billion, with about 93% coming from short positions, the sharpest one sided liquidation wave in recent memory. Crypto finally got a real move after a long stretch of dead price action.
There’s a genuine macro catalyst behind this move: the US Treasury announced it’s doubling the size of its bond buyback program, pushing long end yields lower. The market is reading this as a form of implicit yield curve control, and gold and silver both jumped more than 3.5% in tandem. That’s a liquidity easing signal worth keeping an eye on.
Watching the positioning data alongside price: open interest actually dropped fast while price ripped higher. That tells you this move wasn’t driven mainly by fresh longs coming in, it was largely shorts being forced to cover, stop outs, liquidations, and buy backs feeding on each other in a textbook short squeeze. A squeeze can send price flying in a short window without meaning bullish capital has genuinely returned. What actually matters now is whether OI and volume rebuild once price stabilizes. If they climb together, that signals real new longs stepping in. If OI keeps shrinking, this looks more like a liquidity sweep on the short side clearing the way for a deeper pullback, not the start of a new trend.
📝 My own lean is toward the latter: this looks like a clean out of low leverage, crowded short positioning, wiping the short side supply that was sitting overhead, as final prep before the next leg down. This actually fits cleanly into the second death cross, holder structure, and valuation framework from my last few posts, more like the washout phase within that setup than something contradicting it.
That said, the Treasury move is a genuine policy pivot signal. If OI actually rebuilds alongside price and holds above this $69,000 level, that would point to liquidity conditions genuinely turning dovish, and I’d go back and re-examine the bearish thesis at that point. Both paths are still open right now, and neither one has been confirmed yet.
📉 Technical structure, holder behavior, valuation, and cycle duration are all now pointing the same direction, but none of them have fully confirmed yet. The genuine bottom signal still requires an explosive high volume red weekly candle that flushes out the last of the leveraged longs in a single move. Until that candle prints, do not catch this knife, do not front run a bottom, and do not chase a relief bounce.
⚠️ That said, for anyone running a lower risk strategy, I think continuing to DCA into the highest conviction assets in crypto from here is a reasonable approach. Avoiding blind knife catching does not mean you need to take on the higher risk task of guessing the exact bottom tick. Each time these signals cluster together and point toward a bottoming zone, building a position gradually at these lower cost levels is simply a way of spreading out entry timing risk.
🎯 To restate it one more time, my terminal target remains under ongoing validation: BTC $50,000 to $52,500 / ETH $1,350 to $1,400
✍🏻 Personal Perspective
🚨 $BTC: four signals converging. Bull market support band second death cross, on chain holder structure, valuation, and cycle duration all point to a high probability Q4 bear bottom 📉
Revisiting the thread from two posts ago: https://t.co/OtCmz2MRVE…
1️⃣ Technical structure: Bull Market Support Band completes its second death cross Two posts ago I flagged that the two moving averages forming the Bull Market Support Band were converging toward a death cross. After yesterday’s (2026/08/16) weekly candle closed, that cross confirmed as expected. This is the second death cross of the current cycle. Looking at the same structure in 2022 for reference: after the first death cross, the moving averages briefly crossed back golden and the market assumed the storm had passed. After the second death cross, BTC fell from $32,000 to $17,000, a drop of nearly 47 percent. Historically, it is this second confirmation, not the first, that marks the true start of the primary decline. We are now waiting for a single explosive high volume red candle on the weekly timeframe.
2️⃣ Holder structure: BTC STH HODL Waves has entered the historical bear bottom washout zone This chart tracks the share of total supply held by short term holders, defined as coins held under six months. During blow off tops, fresh buyers chasing the rally push this share sharply higher. But ahead of every genuine bear bottom, those same buyers end up underwater and eventually capitulate, handing supply over to long term holders. The short term holder share then compresses back down to the same historical low band seen at the 2015, 2019, 2020, and 2022 to 2023 bottoms. The current reading is approaching that same compression zone, indicating speculative supply is being flushed out. (Source: CryptoQuant)
3️⃣ Valuation: BTC MVRV Z Score has not yet reached bottom levels This metric measures how far market cap has deviated, in standard deviations, from realized cap, which approximates the average cost basis of all coins on chain. A higher reading means more of the market is sitting on unrealized profit, which builds pressure to sell. Historical peaks have all occurred in the red overheated zone above 7 (notably, this particular bull run never produced a clear overheating signal). A reading near or below 0, the green zone, indicates the market price has fallen back to or below the average holder’s cost basis, at which point sell pressure naturally dries up. Every historical bottom has occurred in that sub zero zone. The Z Score has pulled back meaningfully from its highs but has not yet entered that deep undervaluation zone, though it is approaching it and is worth watching closely. (Source: Bitcoin Magazine Pro)
Reading these two charts together: STH HODL Waves tells you who is holding the supply, while MVRV Z Score tells you whether that supply is cheap or expensive. The former has already entered its historical washout zone while the latter has not yet caught up. Weak hands are already exiting, but the market price has not yet fallen to where the average holder’s cost basis sits. Holder structure is leading the reset while valuation is lagging behind it. In my view this is a textbook pattern of a bear bottom forming out of sync across metrics.
4️⃣ Cycle duration: historical precedent points to October or November Looking at the prior three bull to bear cycles, the time from cycle high to cycle low was 406 days, 363 days, and 376 days respectively. This cycle’s high was set on 2025/10/06, and as of today 315 days have elapsed. Applying the same range, the most likely window for this cycle’s bottom falls between early October and mid November, meaning Q4.