Bitcoin has found some relief after months of selling pressure. On Wednesday, the cryptocurrency jumped nearly 6% to over $69,000, reclaiming a level it had not touched since early June. The jump came right after the Treasury Department announced that it would double purchases of older long-term government bonds.
“The market read this as a quiet form of quantitative easing, a move that weakens the dollar and sends scarce, debasement-hedge assets like Bitcoin higher,” Matt Mena, a senior strategist at crypto research firm 21Shares, told Fortune in a written statement.
Investors quickly piled into those assets, which in turn forced short sellers to cover roughly $1.5 billion in positions by buying Bitcoin in the market. That included purchases of about $700 million in a single minute, an event that 21Shares said may have amounted to the largest short squeeze in Bitcoin’s history.
The rally follows months of weak price action as Bitcoin struggled to recover from a brutal crash last October. Since that rout, which triggered more than $19 billion in liquidations, Bitcoin has fallen about 40% from the $115,000 level where it traded at the time, according to CoinGecko.
Alongside the Treasury announcement, Mena said investors have increasingly priced in a pause in rate hikes over the past two months. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs drew roughly $1 billion in inflows during the first two weeks of August, adding another source of demand for the cryptocurrency.
