Bitcoin Short Squeeze Liquidates $3B, But Outlets Can't Agree on Duration or Peak Price

3 min readPublished 25 Aug 2026

A short squeeze tore through Bitcoin derivatives markets, forcing more than $3 billion in leveraged positions to close. On that headline figure, Bloomberg and Crypto Briefing agree. On almost everything else about the event — how long it lasted, how high the price actually went — their reporting pulls apart.

Bloomberg reported that Bitcoin pushed past $72,000 in the wake of a record squeeze that forced bearish traders to exit, and that positioning in Bitcoin futures had not rebuilt meaningfully in the 24 hours after more than $3 billion in leveraged positions were forced closed — a pattern Bloomberg said points to short covering rather than new bullish bets driving the move. Crypto Briefing described a longer, messier event: a 45-hour stretch spanning August 19-20 in which more than $3 billion in crypto derivatives positions were liquidated, with Bitcoin briefly touching $71,000 before spiking as high as $79,600 during the chaos.

That is not a rounding difference. It is two different pictures of the same market event.

Where the sources agree

Three points hold across the reporting. First, the liquidation total: both Bloomberg and Crypto Briefing put it above $3 billion. Second, the direction of the move: Bloomberg and The Block both reported Bitcoin pushing past $72,000. Third, and most consequential for traders, the open interest signal — Bloomberg reported that futures positioning had not rebuilt meaningfully after the liquidation, a pattern it said suggests the rally was driven largely by short covering rather than fresh bullish positions. Crypto Briefing reached the same conclusion by a different data path, reporting that open interest in Bitcoin futures dropped approximately 15%, from around 353,500 BTC to 312,600 BTC, a one-month low, and framed that decline as confirmation that positions were being closed, not opened.

Where the sources diverge

The duration of the event is the first fault line. Bloomberg’s reporting describes liquidations over 24 hours. Crypto Briefing describes a 45-hour window across two calendar days, August 19 and 20. Both outlets are describing what appears to be the same liquidation cascade, but readers relying on only one would come away with a materially different sense of how fast the market moved.

The second, larger divergence is price. Bloomberg and The Block both cite Bitcoin pushing past $72,000. Crypto Briefing, however, reported an intraday spike to $79,600 — well above the $72,000 level the other two outlets cite. No outlet in this evidence set reconciles that gap.

A cluster of granular figures — that short sellers absorbed roughly $2.77 billion, or 92%, of total liquidations; that shorts held 51-52% of open interest heading into the move; and that Bitcoin alone accounted for roughly $1.67 billion of short liquidations — comes from Crypto Briefing alone. Crypto Briefing also attributed the trigger to a US Treasury announcement doubling the maximum size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated bonds, a detail not present in the Bloomberg or The Block reporting available to us.

What it means, and what’s unresolved

Crypto Briefing noted that funding rates flipped positive after the squeeze, arguing that the negative-funding bearish crowding that preceded the move had been corrected, at least temporarily. But whether that correction holds is precisely what remains open. Bloomberg’s finding that positioning had not rebuilt meaningfully, echoed independently by Crypto Briefing’s 15% open-interest decline, points to a rally built on short covering rather than new conviction. The Block reported that analysts were scrutinizing whether spot and ETF buying, not just the squeeze, was behind Bitcoin’s move past $72,000, framing the $70k level as the threshold traders were watching to judge whether the advance could hold once the squeeze dynamics faded.

What no outlet in this evidence set has done is reconcile the timeline or the peak-price gap. Until one does, readers are left choosing between a 24-hour squeeze that topped $72,000 and a 45-hour squeeze that briefly hit $79,600 — two versions of the same trade.