🐳 Daily Edition: Bears Hunted in Largest Short Liquidation Event of 2026

An unexpected announcement from the US Treasury this morning regarding the move to double the size of their buyback operations for longer-dated debt sent markets into a frenzy, resulting in one of the greenest days we’ve seen in crypto for quite some time.

The two biggest winners of the day were ETH and HYPE, both of which saw over +20% intraday gains as compared to BTC’s more modest +7% move. Data from CoinGlass shows almost $2B in crypto liquidations over the last 24 hours, with short positions making up more than 90% of that figure; perhaps more interestingly, ETH alone accounted for over $500M of the short liquidations in that stretch.

Usually when we see ETH outperform BTC to this degree it signals the unwinding of aggressive positions across derivatives rather than a major rotation based on fundamentals, and given the short positioning data it seems this was another example of that. My original guess for why it ripped so hard was that positive information on the CLARITY Act had been leaked, however given the prediction market odds for its passage haven’t moved much, we can likely attribute most of the pump to the pseudo-Quantitative Easing on behalf of the Treasury and a good old-fashioned short-squeeze.

Hyperliquid, on the other hand, had a much more straight-forward reason to rip today: at a White House event with crypto and prediction market executives, Trump stated that regulators including CFTC Chairman Mike Selif are working to bring Hyperliquid to the US in a fully compliant and legal fashion.

In other words, perhaps the biggest risk to Hyperliquid’s future as an exchange is being taken off the table. I’m sure they’ll have to make a few concessions as we’ve seen others like Polymarket do for their US platforms, but this is undoubtedly huge for HYPE and its ecosystem.

The trenchers are NOT ok

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• Trump Opens Door to Hyperliquid as US Pulls Crypto Trade Onshore

• Bitcoin Surges Toward $70k as $1.14 Billion in Crypto Shorts Get Rekt in an Hour

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Crypto Stocks Rip Higher as Strategy Jumps 12%, Coinbase Climbs 9%

• Kalshi Pushes Beyond Prediction Markets With Copper Perpetual Futures

New Launches

• Coinbase’s Base is Betting Big on AI Agents With $1 Million Startup Accelerator

Crime

• Alleged $165M Crypto Ponzi Mastermind Deported From Fiji to US

Interesting Reads

• Rain CEO says stablecoin payments reach more than 100,000 merchants without them knowing it

• A year after losing $1.46 billion, Bybit says AI helped it save $700 million

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