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🐳 Daily Edition: BTC Rips Past $85k as Shorts Get Squeezed

🐳 Daily Edition: BTC Rips Past $85k as Shorts Get Squeezed

$850B in short liquidations acted as fuel for today's move taking Bitcoin to an 8-month high, as the market decides the Clarity Act's failure may have been a blessing in disguise

Beluga & Will McKinnon
September 21, 2026

Between Bitcoin’s monster gain to an 8-month high and the impressive move on the rest of altcoin market, we are once again closing in on $3T in total market cap across the crypto sector. To give an idea of how quickly this melt up has happened, in the last week alone the crypto market has added over $400B in market cap.

24 Hour Heatmap, Source: CoinMarketCap

Interestingly, today’s gain was not preceded by major institutional buying via the ETFs as we’ve seen throughout the year; in fact, Bitcoin ETFs took in just $6M in net flows last week, and actually bled over $400M the week prior. While I’m sure today will show some significant inflows based on the price action, to me this looks a lot more like people were offsides due to the Clarity Act shenanigans and the crypto market humbled them. $850B in short liquidations today seems to support that thesis.

As we discussed in the newsletter last Wednesday after Clarity failed its cloture vote, the SEC and CFTC issuing their own regulations could end up being a positive thing in the short term. CFTC Chair Michael Selig himself said they are “locked in,” and given they submitted their set of rules to the White House just 2 days after the Clarity vote I’m inclined to believe him.

We’ll be watching ETF flows closely this week, as that should point us in the right direction on whether this was just a major short squeeze or the start of a much bigger move.

/fill_the_wick

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