Bitcoin (BTC) climbed back above its 200-day moving average on Thursday. That puts the cryptocurrency past $72,000 for the first time since November 2025, and it set off what CoinGlass data shows was the largest single-day short-liquidation event on record.
BTC traded around $72,345 at press time, The Block’s price data showed. It had touched nearly $73,000 intraday, per TradingView. That is a gain of more than 13% since Wednesday. The price also cleared $72,000 for the first time since May. Heavily shorted positioning got caught flat-footed. Over the same window, $2.75 billion in Bitcoin shorts were liquidated.
The 200-day moving average is a widely watched trend gauge. Nine months below it. Now reclaimed. That marks a technical turning point.
Liquidity lit the fuse
The immediate catalyst came out of Washington, not crypto-specific flows. The US Treasury Department said Wednesday it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated securities. The per-operation cap goes from $2 billion to at least $4 billion, effective Sept. 9, Cointelegraph reported.
The goal is to improve liquidity at the long end of the Treasury market. The initial effect was straightforward: long-term yields dropped, risk appetite picked up.
Paul Howard, senior director at Wincent, said the conditions amplified the move. “The low-volatility environment created the perfect tinderbox, where any positive news could be magnified by thin liquidity into outsized price movement.” He told The Block that twenty-four-hour trading volumes have risen 5x from the yearly low recorded the prior weekend.
Geoff Kendrick at Standard Chartered said the Treasury expansion could help fuel a broader Bitcoin rally toward $100,000 by year-end. That is a forecast.
Demand underneath
The squeeze alone does not explain why the breakout has held. On-chain demand turned positive in both spot and perpetual futures for the first time since the October 2025 all-time high. The data comes from CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju.
“The scale remains modest, but if this holds for another month, it would be reasonable to conclude that the bear market is over and a new bull cycle has begun,” he said.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $517 million in a single day earlier in the week. That is the largest one-day inflow since early May.
The test ahead
Analysts framed the next threshold plainly. Nicolai Søndergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, said sustained acceptance above $70,000 would keep the outlook constructive. A pullback toward the $69,700–$69,000 area would be a normal test of the breakout, not an automatic trend reversal.
Gideon Hyams, chairman and co-founder of STS Digital, was more direct. “Squeezes start rallies, but they don’t sustain them, and this one has more behind it than forced buying,” he said. “Falling long-end yields, returning ETF flows and a clearer regulatory path in Washington are exactly the conditions that turn a bounce into a trend. The test is whether BTC can hold above the range that trapped it since June, and so far it’s passing.”
XRP (XRP) jumped 20% over the same 24-hour window. The Block’s price data showed the broader market following BTC higher.
