Crypto Rally Extends as Bitcoin Nears $78.5K and Ethereum Clears $2.5K

The tape rotates beyond Bitcoin and Ether Bitcoin and Ether set the market’s direction, but the distribution of gains is more revealing than either headline price. The table shows where buying accelerated most recently and where the largest weekly repricings had already occurred according to information from CoinMarketCap at the time of writing. AssetPrice1h change24h change7d changeBitcoin$78,490+1.3%+78%+24%Ethereum$2,510+3%+8.5%+34%BNB$683+1.2%+4.6%+13%XRP$1.40+2.4%+11.8%+41%Solana$93.5+2%+7%+24.7%Hyperliquid$76.8+1.5%+2.7%+37.5%Dogecoin$0.0915+5.2%+14%+31.3%Zcash$723+2%+26.7%+47.5%Chainlink$12+3%+14.9%+36%Cardano$0.225+2.6%+14%+26.5% The hourly leaders and the 24-hour leaders are not identical. Zcash’s biggest move took place earlier in the session, while Dogecoin, Chainlink and Cardano were still gaining faster than Bitcoin at the latest reading. That split suggests fresh risk-taking, rather than a single uniform move across the market. Participation is broader than a Bitcoin-only rally, but it is still selective. BNB and Hyperliquid trailed the fastest movers, while Tron and LEO were barely changed in the wider snapshot. The data supports a rotation into liquid, higher-volatility assets, not proof of a full altseason or identifiable institutional flows. Even so, breadth remains selective. Laggards like Tron and UNUS SED LEO sat out the party, confirming this is a calculated capital rotation rather than an indiscriminate altseason. How a Treasury policy shift lit the fuse The broader macro pivot began when the U.S. Treasury announced plans to effectively double its maximum long-dated bond buyback operations from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per cycle. Long-duration yields softened instantly, sending immediate tailwinds through Bitcoin, Ether, and gold. As we detailed in our deep dive on Treasury’s expanded long-bond buybacks, this policy isn’t a backdoor quantitative easing engine. Rather, it unclogs vital liquidity channels for aging government paper, driving yields down and pushing yield-hungry capital out the risk curve. That macro injection slammed straight into a digital asset market that had spent weeks grinding sideways in a tight cage. Once price action broke key resistance levels, trapped short positions faced a brutal reckoning. CoinGlass flagged the August 19 flush as crypto’s eighth-largest liquidation event in history. We dissected the mechanics of that cascade in our report on the $2.99 billion liquidation event. Catching up to equities, but let’s drop the “undervalued” label Bulls love to lean on a relative-value narrative here. U.S. equities have been printing record highs all month, the S&P 500 settled at 7,798.99 on August 13, prompting UBS to bump its year-end target to 8,100 on the back of resilient tech earnings and AI capex. Crypto entered the week nursing a multi-week hangover of compressed volatility. Calling tokens “undervalued” based on traditional equity metrics misses the mark, unlike stocks, tokens lack quarterly earnings reports or predictable cash-flow multiples. But the price action tells a simpler story: while equity investors piled into AI winners and safe-haven gold, crypto sat sidelined, making it an oversized sponge for newly unlocked macro liquidity.