A week ago bitcoin was struggling near $75,000, and talk of another leg down felt reasonable. On Wednesday it blew past $87,000 for the first time since late January, jumping nearly 8% intraday and briefly touching $87,354.
The move fed on itself. Traders who had bet against bitcoin found themselves underwater, and once price cleared a handful of technical levels, exchanges began force-closing those bets. Estimates put short liquidations at $870-900 million, with total derivatives liquidations across the market topping $1 billion over 24 hours and hitting more than 139,000 traders.
Spot bitcoin ETFs supplied real fuel too: roughly $435 million flowed into US funds the Friday before the spike. A broader equity rally helped, and some analysts tie the renewed appetite to the SEC's recent move allowing tokenized versions of US securities to trade domestically.
Technically, bitcoin reclaimed its 50-week moving average around $78,700, a level traders watch as a trend signal. The next resistance sits near $88,000-90,000, though the asset remains well below January's $97,000 high and further still from October 2025's record above $126,000.
Not everyone is convinced the rally sticks. Short squeezes cut both ways — once the pool of forced-closing positions dries up, the artificial fuel disappears, and the market has to prove the move with real demand rather than panic among traders on the wrong side of the bet.
