Bitcoin price jumps $2,000 to reclaim $78,000 after $80M shorts liquidated

Bitcoin did something shorts didn't plan for: it bounced. The cryptocurrency surged roughly $2,000 over eight hours, climbing from lows near $76,300 back above the $78,000 mark as a wave of forced liquidations swept through leveraged bearish positions.

Over $247 million in short positions were liquidated across crypto markets on September 17 and 18, with Bitcoin shorts accounting for a significant share of that total. Bitcoin-specific short liquidations came in around $66 million, compared to roughly $32 million in long liquidations over the same window.

Bitcoin traded within the $77,400 to $78,300 range during early trading on September 18, posting 24-hour gains of between 1.3% and 2.3%. The $78,000 level had already attracted attention as a psychological and technical threshold, partly because of the dense cluster of short interest sitting just above it.

The Federal Reserve delivered a 25-basis-point interest rate hike on September 16 and 17, a move that briefly pushed Bitcoin below $76,000 as risk assets sold off across the board.

The $77,500 to $78,000 zone had accumulated enough short interest that analysts flagged it as a pressure point before the move even happened. Bitcoin had been consolidating in the $76,000 to $82,000 corridor in the days leading up to the move, with mixed signals from ETF flows and macro data keeping sentiment uncertain.