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Bitcoin rebounded 8% from a seven-day low of about $75,500 to reach $81,800. Falling crude oil prices eased inflation concerns and helped fuel a short squeeze above $80,000. U.S. Central Command commander Brad Cooper indicated an increase in crude oil, cargo, and liquefied natural gas shipments, and Brent crude fell from around $111 on September 11 to about $104, while WTI crude also dropped from $106 to below $100. The Fed raised its policy rate by 25 basis points to 3.75-4.00%, but the crypto market saw $201 million in forced liquidations over 24 hours, with shorts accounting for $112.9 million. A motion to begin deliberation on the CLARITY Act failed by a vote of 49 to 50, and its probability of passage fell from 31% to 7%, while the SEC introduced a five-year conditional exemption for TSV to handle tokenized NMS equities, and the CFTC also sent crypto trading and market regulation proposals to the White House. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw inflows of about $159 million on Thursday and $433 million on September 18, marking the first back-to-back net inflows since September 3.

Bitcoin's sharpest rally in two years was driven almost entirely by short liquidations rather than fresh bullish buying, according to a new report from analytics firm Glassnode and crypto exchange Bybit. Over five days in August, Bitcoin climbed 24.6% even as coin-denominated open interest, a measure of active leverage, fell 12.6%, with roughly 64,000 BTC worth of open interest closed out and short positions supplying 89% of every liquidated dollar during the stretch. The options market confirmed the pattern: puts had priced richer than calls for 361 straight days before a single session ended that run, while Bybit's volatility index traveled four times its normal daily range and the front of the futures curve repriced sharply as longer-dated contracts barely moved. The report, with data as of the settled close of August 23, draws on Glassnode's coverage of four crypto-native options venues and excludes CME, so its figures describe the crypto-native market rather than every venue where Bitcoin trades. The dynamic has persisted: Bitcoin blasted back above $80,000 this week after the Federal Reserve paired its first rate hike since 2023 with a dovish forecast, triggering another squeeze that liquidated more than $230 million in Bitcoin shorts and over $445 million across the market in a single session, with CoinGlass data showing roughly $529 million in total liquidations over 24 hours, again mostly from shorts. The report's authors flagged the open question their data raises, namely whether August's repricing sticks, noting that a durable shift would show up as skew holding call-bid and the front of the curve staying firm, while a return of put premium alongside fading funding would mark it as an event the market absorbed rather than a new regime it entered.

Analysts at JPMorgan Chase said Bitcoin could receive stronger price support than gold if hedging activity tied to exchange-traded funds declines. According to the bank, gold ETFs have already recovered the outflows seen since the start of 2026, while Bitcoin ETFs have recouped only about half of their outflows, and demand for Bitcoin ETFs has weakened recently, meaning Bitcoin has more room to recover than gold if conditions improve. Behind this is renewed attention on currency debasement trades after the Federal Reserve's meeting in late July, but that trade has lost momentum over the past week, weighed down by rising real interest rates and the lack of progress in the U.S. Senate on the crypto market structure bill known as the Clarity Act. Short interest in the ETFs differs sharply: short interest in BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, is near its highest level of 2026, while short interest in the gold ETF SPDR Gold Shares is below its historical average. For IBIT, the ratio of put option open interest to call option open interest is also higher than for GLD, and JPMorgan analysts concluded that under the current market structure, where IBIT has more short interest than GLD, an unwind of positions could support Bitcoin more than gold if hedging demand declines.