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When will bitcoin break $100,000 again?

Bitcoin is having a strong start to 2026 that could see it catch up with precious metals’ rally. Bitcoin ETFs are also rallying, and saw their second consecutive day of massive inflows, recording $843.6 million on Wednesday, according to SoSoValue, bringing the total for the week to $1.7 billion.

Jake Kennis, research analyst at Nansen, told Sherwood News that a combination of easing inflation fears, geopolitical safe haven demand, stronger ETF inflows, and a technical breakout above $94,000 to $96,000 resistance are all converging to push BTC toward $100,000.

“The rally has solid institutional and onchain backing, but elevated leverage in futures markets and profit-taking by top traders near the $97K–$100K psychological resistance could trigger volatility,” Kennis said.

While bitcoin has retreated after nearing key resistance levels, Timot Lamarre, director of market research at Unchained, said that despite the asset having been well off all-time highs, it is set up for a sustainable run above $100,000.

“Institutions continue to open up bitcoin buying opportunities to new pools of capital, the macro environment continues to move toward significant monetary easing, and governments, companies, and individuals continue to increase their bitcoin stockpiles,” he said.

The analytics team at B2BINPAY echoed the sentiment, saying that the market structure remains bullish, “with potential to reach $100–105K in the coming weeks, potentially reaching the $120K–140K range later in 2026 if demand stays in place.” 

A failure would likely mean a pullback to the $88,000 to $90,000 range, where liquidity is already concentrated, they said.

“Another crucial marker is leverage. Funding rates and open interest are far from extreme, with total OI at around $65B. That’s high. Yet, it’s still below the prior record/near-record zone seen in 2025, around $72B–$75B. So the market isn’t stretched,” the analysts said.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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