The doubling of US bond repurchases detonates 1.1 billion short positions

According to Woofun AI, on August 19, 2026, the Bitcoin price rebounded strongly, approaching the $70,000 mark, directly triggering a record wave of short selling and liquidations. This sharp fluctuation is not simply a technical fix; it is the result of macroeconomic policy changes combined with leverage squeezing in the derivatives market, marking another exposure of the vulnerability of crypto assets under extreme market conditions.

According to data compiled by Woofun AI, the BTC price once hit $68,982.40 on the same day, recording a 5.4% increase, a new high since June. Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33 Research, pointed out that the single-day perpetual contract short settlement amount reached $1.1 billion, breaking the $1 billion mark, far exceeding the record of US$757 million in May 2021 and US$694 million in November 2025.

Notably, since Binance has implemented data restrictions since April 2021, historical comparisons need to be careful. According to CoinGlass data, the total amount of global liquidations in the past 24 hours reached $1.92 billion, of which $1.74 billion came from bearish traders, and $1.73 billion was concentrated in four hours. Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid recorded a single BTC-USD liquidation of $48.8 million, while Binance forced the closure of approximately $517.6 million of positions during the same period.

The underlying reason is that the US Treasury announced on August 19 that it will double the amount of repurchase operations to support long-term nominal securities liquidity. The move caused the 30-year US Treasury yield to soar to 5.34%, hitting its highest level since 2007. Industry analysts believe that this structural change in the government debt market has forced capital to seek higher volatile assets to hedge against earnings pressure, thereby boosting leverage risk in the crypto market.

With the reshaping of the macro-liquidity situation, the focus of the market has turned to the US Treasury debt auction and subsequent repurchase operations at the end of this month. If the high-yield environment continues, the trend of capital migration to more volatile assets may intensify, leading to more frequent extreme liquidation events. This is yet another systemic stress test facing the crypto derivatives market following unusual fluctuations in the yield of traditional financial instruments.