Bitcoin flirts with $80,000 and Hyperliquid establishes itself on the derivatives market

He who thinks he takes is taken. This Saturday morning, Bitcoin did not give up all the ground. On Friday, it pushed as high as $79,500, its highest since May, after sinking below $77,000 earlier in the day. This morning, the price is oscillating in a still high range, between 77,000 and 78,800 dollars. More than $4 billion in short positions have been blown since Wednesday. A pace of liquidation that had not been seen for months. Except that, even after the high, the star is not quite Bitcoin: it is Hyperliquid which continues to win part of the stake.

Bitcoin at $79,500 Friday: the short squeeze fuse is not out

The breakout of $77,800 fell on Friday. The BTC price tested the level, then continued its journey until flirting with $80,000. The more than $4 billion in shorts liquidated since Wednesday tell of a market caught on the wrong foot. Short sellers, positioned against the asset for weeks, had to buy back urgently. Each forced buyback pushed the price a little higher, and each increase triggered new buybacks.

The Fear and Greed index followed suit: 41 Tuesday, 46 Wednesday, 62 Thursday, 72 Friday. This Saturday, it remains around 71, in the free greed zone. The pace of liquidations accelerated over three sessions, not slowed down. The annual record remains far away: around $126,180, a threshold that the market has not seen since October 2025. That’s on Bitcoin’s side.

On Hyperliquid, the leverage makes more noise than the underlying

While Bitcoin consolidates a few dollars below its high from the day before, Hyperliquid still grabs the headlines. The perpetual contracts protocol, derivatives that allow you to bet on a price with leverage, without expiry, saw an individual position of $25.13 million in Bitcoin. A liquidation of 23.59 million dollars came as a reminder, a few hours later, that the lever cuts in both directions.

According to Fortune, the platform is becoming the darling of active traders, to the point of stealing some of the attention from Bitcoin on a rally evening. This Saturday, the HYPE token even extends the movement, above $79 after a more tense intraday high. Not a surprise for those who have followed Hyperliquid since its beginnings: the platform has already absorbed hundreds of millions of liquidations this week and a growing share of the volume of perps.

Bitcoin: a rally which is mainly based on a gesture from the Treasury

The problem is that the macro trigger still depends on a single policy lever. The US Treasury announced this week the doubling of its long-term bond buyback program, from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation. The announcement was enough to compress long-term rates and revive risky assets. However, the first operations at the new size will not begin until September 9. There is no guarantee that this bet holds up given the scale of the debt to be refinanced.