Three attempts, measured side by side

Rather than describe today in isolation, it is more useful to put all three of this week's pushes above $80,000 through the same measurements. Every figure below comes from closed five minute Binance spot candles.

AttemptHighCandle beforeTop candleCandle afterGive back
Mon Aug 24$80,000.0051.2%60.7%19.9%1.91%
Tue Aug 25$81,272.6253.6%55.1%44.2%4.21%
Fri Aug 28$81,478.8771.6%52.4%43.3%4.34%

Two things move in opposite directions across those rows. The highs get progressively higher: $80,000, then $81,273, then $81,479. And the give backs get progressively deeper: 1.91%, then 4.21%, then 4.34%.

The character of each top also inverted. On Monday the dramatic candle came after the high, when $48.9 million crossed the spread at a 19.9% buy share, the most sell skewed short reading we have published. Today the dramatic candle came before the high: the 01:25 candle read 71.6%, which is above the five minute 90th percentile of 68.0%, and then the top itself was an unremarkable 52.4% and the aftermath a mild 43.3%.

So the loudest rejection produced the smallest give back and the quietest produced the largest. If you had been watching only the taker readings, Monday would have looked like the serious one.

Three instances is three instances. We are not calling this a pattern, and readers who have followed this site for the past month know why we are careful about that particular temptation.

Open interest rose while price fell

Most of the coverage attributed today's decline to profit taking and long liquidations. Open interest says otherwise, and it is the cheapest available check.

Across the session, Binance perpetual open interest went up 3.00% while the price went down 2.57%. Liquidations close contracts, so a liquidation driven fall shows open interest falling. Rising open interest on a falling price means contracts were being opened, which is most consistent with new short positions being established into the decline rather than existing longs being forced out.

The intraday shape adds detail. Open interest peaked at 109,868 BTC at 07:00 UTC, several hours after the price high, and sits about 1.95% below that peak now. So there was some unwinding through the middle of the session, and the net across the whole day was still an increase.

The account positioning agrees. The Binance global long/short ratio was below parity at 0.9869 in the 13:00 hour, meaning more accounts short than long, and has since moved to 1.0454. We report that as a fact about how accounts are currently arranged and we are not projecting from it, for the same reason we gave on Monday and again on Wednesday.

The rally was not all forced buying

One explanation circulating today is that this month's move was driven mainly by short sellers being squeezed rather than by real demand, and that this is why it could not clear resistance. It is a reasonable thesis and the daily record only partly supports it.

SessionPriceOpen interestReading
Aug 19+7.12%0.12% lowerCovering
Aug 20+5.32%1.15% higherContracts opening
Aug 21+7.27%0.13% higherContracts opening
Aug 24+1.62%0.27% lowerCovering
Aug 27+1.55%0.94% lowerCovering
Aug 282.57% lower3.00% higherContracts opening

The two largest contributing sessions of the entire run, August 20 and August 21, both had open interest rising. Those are not covering. Positions were being opened by people who chose to open them, at $70,000 and above.

August 19 genuinely was a squeeze, and we documented it at the time: roughly $2.7 billion of shorts liquidated. But the sessions that added the most price after it were not. So the claim is right about the ignition and wrong about the body of the move.

We are in a position to be precise about this because we made the same mistake. On August 20 we wrote that the squeeze fuel had been spent, implying the move was near its end. Bitcoin added another 7.4% the next day, and we corrected it on August 21 by showing that leg had open interest rising rather than falling. The correction is what makes today's table possible.

The 50-week average, and a number we could not match

Reporting today again pointed at the 50-week moving average as the ceiling, putting it near $81,085. Computed on our own data from completed weekly closes through August 23, we get $81,823, a difference of about $738.

We cannot reconcile that gap from the outside. The likely causes are a different price source or the inclusion of the still open week, which would pull the average down. We are flagging it rather than quietly adopting either figure, because a reader deciding whether a level was reached deserves to know the level itself is disputed by nearly a percent.

On our number, today's high of $81,479 came within 0.42%, about $344, of the average. On theirs it would have exceeded it. Both descriptions cannot be right and we are not in a position to settle it, so here is ours with its method attached.

What is not in dispute: Bitcoin has approached this zone three times in five sessions and has not closed a session above $80,250.

Yesterday's guide, tested the next day

We published a reference guide to our own buy share metric yesterday, built on 5,000 candles. The two sessions since have produced textbook cases of the two things it argued hardest.

CaseReadingGuide percentileWhat price did
Thursday, full session45.3%Below the daily 10th of 45.7%Closed up 1.55%
Today 07:00, one hour23.7%Far below the hourly 10th of 39.4%Fell only 0.31%
Today 14:00, one hour47.5%Near the hourly medianRose 0.27% on the day's largest volume
Today 01:25, five minutes71.6%Above the 5m 90th of 68.0%Rose 0.10%, then the high

The first row is the guide's central claim arriving one day later. Thursday closed up 1.55% on a daily buy share of 45.3%, which is below the tenth percentile of all daily readings. A session in the weakest decile for aggressive buying was one of the better up days of the week. The guide's figure was that 45.4% of Bitcoin up days close with a sub-50% reading, and Thursday went further than that.

The second row is the other half. An hourly reading of 23.7% is extraordinarily sell skewed, well below the hourly tenth percentile, and the price fell 0.31%. An extreme reading produced a trivial move, which is what a correlation of 0.355 looks like in practice.

Neither of these is a coincidence worth marvelling at. They are the ordinary behaviour the measurements described, showing up on schedule.

Nine days of inflows, and a figure worth keeping in view

The flows have not turned with the price. US spot Bitcoin ETFs took $242 million on August 27, a ninth consecutive day of net inflows and the longest such run since April, after $232.12 million on August 26. August has now passed $3 billion.

One number belongs beside that, and it appears in almost none of the coverage. Even after this month, US spot Bitcoin ETFs are reported to remain net negative for 2026 by roughly $2.5 billion. August has clawed back a little more than half of what left the funds between May and July. That is a different picture from the one a nine day streak alone suggests, and both are true.

Today's flow figure publishes after the US close and we will not estimate it.

Where things stand

AssetPrice24h24h range
Bitcoin$78,1502.86% lower$77,944 to $81,479
Ether$2,462.192.47% lower$2,445.40 to $2,535.05
XRP$1.40674.06% lower$1.3866 to $1.4740
Solana$105.002.09% lower$103.63 to $110.60
BNB$695.672.30% lower$692.80 to $719.99
Dogecoin$0.085753.68% lower$0.08521 to $0.09033
Tokenised gold$4,5101.96% lower$4,509 to $4,624

Everything is down, gold included, which is the same broad pattern we noted on August 19 running in reverse. Total market capitalisation is $2.663 trillion, down 4.21%, with Bitcoin dominance at 59.02%. The price sits 12.83% above the 200-day moving average of $69,261.

Funding has stayed off its ceiling: the last six settlements read 0.0046%, 0.0100%, 0.0063%, 0.0066%, 0.0100% and 0.0059%, against the six consecutive prints at exactly 0.0100% we reported on Monday.

Fear and Greed reads 73, Greed, unchanged in tone from Monday despite the week's round trip. The ETH to BTC ratio is 0.03148, up 0.26%. That is the seventh day we have reported it: up, up, down, up, down, up, up. Still not a trend.

What we are not saying

We are not saying $81,479 is a top. It is the highest print of the run and it is one print.

We are not saying three rejections make a pattern. Three is three, and this site has spent the month refusing to name trends from handfuls.

We are not saying rising open interest into a decline means the short sellers are right. It means contracts were opened. Who was on which side of them, and whether they profit, is not in the data we have.

We are not saying the 50-week average caused anything. We are saying our figure for it is $81,823, that others report $81,085, and that we cannot reconcile the two.

What we are saying is that today produced the highest price of the run and the deepest give back of the week, that open interest rose rather than fell while it happened, and that the popular explanation for the whole August move does not survive contact with the daily open interest record. Every number above came from a public endpoint anyone can query.