Key Takeaways
- Bitcoin gained $14,264 (22.7%) in one week, its largest-ever weekly dollar gain.
- Galaxy Research flags bitcoin’s 50-week moving average near $82,470 as the next bottom-confirmation signal.
- Bitcoin touched $81,000 recently before easing back, with Treasury buyback changes cited as a rally driver.
The Week by the Numbers
Bitcoin closed out the trading week (ending Aug. 23) gaining $14,264, or 22.7%, to end at $77,387, enough to make the stretch bitcoin’s strongest weekly performance in dollar terms since the asset began trading, even though bitcoin has seen bigger percentage swings in earlier, cheaper years.
A 22.7% move sounds dramatic, and it is, but bitcoin has posted larger percentage gains before, back when the entire market was worth a fraction of what it is today. What made last week different was the price bitcoin was moving from.
At current levels, even a modest percentage swing translates into a five-figure dollar move, something impossible when bitcoin traded in the hundreds or low thousands.
Momentum did not stop once the candle closed as bitcoin’s price pushed as high as $81,000 in the days after, touching a three-month high before easing back to the $79,000 region.
Traders pointed to a specific catalyst behind the move, i.e. the U.S. Treasury said it would at least double the size of its long-end liquidity-support buybacks, from $2 billion to a minimum of $4 billion per operation, with larger operations running from September 9 through November 4.
Galaxy Digital Head of Research Alex Thorn pointed to another tell behind the rally: Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund (IBIT) saw its largest retail “buy skew” in two years, a sign ordinary investors, not just institutions, piled back in during the run to $81,257.
Where Wall Street Sees the Next Signal
Galaxy Research has also been watching bitcoin’s 50-week moving average, currently sitting near $82,470, to gauge what comes next. In a separate research note covered by Bitcoin.com News, the firm found that in 11 of 13 completed bear markets since 2011, a weekly close above that average lined up with the cycle bottom already being in. Only two reclaims failed to hold, both during the 2021-2022 double-top cycle.
That gives bitcoin’s price action a concrete target. A close above roughly $82,500 would put bitcoin in territory Galaxy’s own model treats as historically reliable for confirming a bottom, not just a bounce. Fall short, and the record week risks being remembered as a sharp relief rally inside a longer drawdown instead of the start of a new leg up.
Strive chairman and CEO Matt Cole offered one of the more bullish reads on the move, telling media outlets that “the next bitcoin cycle will be the strongest we have ever seen,” pointing to bitcoin’s performance against the dollar and gold as evidence the asset is behaving differently than in past cycles.
That said, dollar-denominated records get easier to break as the price base rises, so a headline number alone does not settle whether the rally has real staying power.
