Bitcoin (BTC) reached $85,111 on Monday, gaining roughly 5.7% over 24 hours. The move carried it cleanly above a resistance level near $82,284 that had held since early September.
The prior week had included a Federal Reserve rate hike, a Bank of Japan increase to a 31-year high, and the US Senate’s rejection of the CLARITY Act.
Bitcoin held above $75,000 throughout all three events without a meaningful breakdown, according to Nexo analyst Iliya Kalchev.
The immediate driver of Monday’s surge was a wave of forced
liquidations on short positions. Of the $746 million to $770 million in total crypto positions closed over 24 hours, $647.9 million came from the short side,
according to CoinGlass. More than $230 million in BTC shorts were wiped out in a single session as the price recovered through $80,000. Spot buyers then pushed the price through $82,000, triggering a second round of stop-losses. Those forced orders carried BTC through $84,000, HashKey senior researcher Tim Sun said.
Several external pressures had eased before the move began. Brent crude slipped to a half-month low after Middle Eastern exports came in stronger than forecasted. The 10-year US Treasury yield, which had touched 5.014% on Sept. 14, its highest since October 2023, fell back to near 4.93%. The two-year yield dropped to 4.67%. US and Chinese officials met in New York ahead of a planned Trump-Xi summit on Sept. 24. Traders also priced in potential US-Iran talks at the UN General Assembly.
Sun described the setup as a “sell the rumor, buy the news” dynamic, arguing most of the de-risking had already occurred before those events had resolved. CoinShares’ head of research James Butterfill
offered a caution. He noted the bigger surprise from the Fed was the removal of projected rate cuts through 2027 from the dot plot. That change supports the dollar and pushes back the loose liquidity conditions BTC has historically responded to. Butterfill wrote that another rate hike this year “now looks increasingly plausible.”
Open interest across the crypto market rose 7.59% to $156 billion even as short positions were being closed. Twenty-four-hour trading volume climbed 39% to $224 billion. That combination indicates traders were opening new positions rather than standing aside. Bitcoin’s total futures open interest topped 700,000 BTC for the first time in weeks. The taker long-short volume ratio in crypto futures leaned roughly 53% in favor of buyers. On Binance, whale derivatives position ratios sat above 2.0, indicating that large accounts held substantial leveraged long exposure.
Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) ended the prior week with a net inflow of just $6.2 million, their smallest since launch,
according to SoSoValue data.
That followed a net outflow of $462.7 million the week before. A Glassnode measure of selling pressure fell by Sept. 20 to one of its lowest readings on record, below levels seen after the December 2022 market bottom. Wallets that had sold consistently through August shifted to net buying by month’s end, and were adding coins at their fastest single-day pace in weeks by Sept. 20, Kalchev said. Three key data events will set the tone ahead: PCE lands on Sept. 30, jobs on Oct. 2, and CPI on Oct. 14.
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