Why Is Bitcoin Price Going Up Today? Rally Defies Every Bearish Catalyst

Bitcoin is trading at $86,767.30, up 1.1% over 24 hours and 14.6% over the past week, following a rally that pushed it to $87,000, its highest level in eight months. Over $1 billion in positions were liquidated in a single 24-hour stretch on the way there.

Every Bearish Catalyst Fired At Once

Three things happened this month that were each expected to break the rally. The CLARITY Act, crypto’s one shot at federal market structure rules, failed on the Senate floor 49-50, ten votes short of the 60 needed, after two years of lobbying. Coinbase stock fell about 8% that day, Circle fell roughly 10%.

The next day, the Federal Reserve delivered a unanimous 25 basis point rate hike under new chair Kevin Walsh, its first hike since 2023, as the 10-year Treasury yield sat above 5% and the Bank of Japan raised rates to a 31-year high in the same window. 

On top of that, the AI trade started cracking too, after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published an essay warning the industry was outpacing its own safety work, quickly echoed publicly by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The semiconductor index dropped over 5% by the following Monday, its worst session since July, with Nvidia, ASML, and SoftBank all falling sharply.