Bitcoin got up to $69,000 on Wednesday, which it had not managed in about two months. Ether had an even better day in percentage terms, up around 10% and back above $2,000 for the first time since May. Solana and XRP both gained more than 5%, so it was a good day if you own any of it.
Two things set it off, and neither one was really about crypto.
The first was the Treasury. On Wednesday morning it said it is at least doubling the size of its buyback operations for longer dated bonds, the 10 to 20 year and the 20 to 30 year stuff. The cap per operation goes from $2 billion up to at least $4 billion, starting September 9 and running through November 4. What that means is the government is buying back more of its own debt to keep that end of the bond market running smoothly. More cash sloshing around usually makes people more willing to hold risky things, and bitcoin is a risky thing. Paul Howard at Wincent made the point that this is not the same as the QE we got five years ago, though he thinks the liquidity effect still matters.
The second was the SEC. On Tuesday afternoon it proposed a package called Regulation Crypto Assets. Under it, crypto projects would get two ways to raise money without going through the full securities registration process. One lets a project raise up to $5 million over four years. The other allows up to $75 million a year. Issuers would still have to disclose things, and bigger raises come with financial statements and ongoing reporting. There is also a path for a crypto asset to stop being treated as a security once the project meets certain conditions, which Yahoo Finance points out would help older networks like bitcoin and ethereum.
A group of crypto executives also went to the White House on Wednesday afternoon to meet Trump, which did not hurt the mood.
The move was sharp enough to wipe out a lot of leveraged traders. CoinGlass counted about $1.92 billion in liquidations over 24 hours, and roughly $1.7 billion of that came in a single four hour stretch. When a market runs like that, the people betting against it get forced to buy back in, and that buying pushes prices up even more.
Crypto stocks came along for the ride. Fold Holdings was up nearly 20%, BitGo and American Bitcoin around 15% each, and Strategy and Bitmine about 10%. Circle gained 12% and Coinbase around 11%. Strategy also got back over $100 a share after spending more than a week below it.
Step back a bit and the day looks smaller. The whole crypto market added about $113 billion and is back near $2.3 trillion, but that is still roughly 40% below the 2025 peak of $3.87 trillion. Bitcoin's record is $126,198, set last October. It has been stuck between about $63,500 and $68,000 for weeks now, and days like this one have faded before.
The one forward looking thing worth mentioning came from VanEck earlier in the week. They said 8 of their 12 capitulation signals are flashing, which they read as the correction getting close to done. Their reasoning is that the last three bear phases ran about 12.7 months from top to bottom, and bitcoin is around month 11 since its October peak, so September through November would be the window if history repeats. Take that for what it is worth, since three past cycles is not much to go on.
The levels people are watching now are $2,000 on ether and $63,500 on bitcoin. Lose those and the market probably goes back down to test the lows for the year.