Bitcoin Breaks a Six-Month Pattern, Approaches $80,000

The rebound comes a week after Strategy’s 11.5%-yielding perpetual preferred stock STRC went ex-dividend on April 15 with bitcoin around $75,000. In each of the preceding monthly cycles, BTC had drifted lower in the week following the payout. This time has broken the pattern, with BTC climbing to $79,000 against a backdrop of persistent negative perpetual futures funding and a steady Coinbase premium — signals that short positioning is heavy while US spot buyers have continued to accumulate. Is it time to buy Bitcoin? Spot investors seem to think so.

BTC is up over 4% overnight and now approaching $80,000, source: BNC

A Short Squeeze?

That combination carries the markings of a short squeeze in the early stages. Funding rates below zero mean shorts are paying longs to keep their positions open, pointing to bearish conviction still running deep in derivatives books. When price rises in that environment, forced covering can accelerate the move. The Coinbase premium — US spot prices trading above offshore venues — has historically tracked institutional bid activity, and its persistence through the ex-dividend window suggests demand on the spot side has not faded.

STRC sits at the centre of Strategy’s latest accumulation phase. The preferred share is engineered to trade near its $100 par value, which allows the company to issue new stock through an at-the-market programme and recycle the proceeds into bitcoin. STRC last traded at $99.47 and has recovered faster than its historical 10-day average since going ex-dividend, clearing the runway for Strategy’s third-largest single bitcoin purchase on record, a 34,164-BTC buy disclosed earlier this week. Executive Chairman Michael Saylor has also proposed moving STRC to semi-monthly dividend payments — a change shareholders will vote on at the June 8 annual meeting — to dampen the cyclicality around ex-dividend dates and keep the stock anchored closer to par.

Fear And Greed Begins to Thaw

Sentiment, meanwhile, has begun to thaw. Bitcoin’s current structure — short-term holders underwater, the 200-day moving average overhead, funding persistently negative — rhymes with the mid-2022 setup that preceded the second leg of the last bear market. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, which printed extreme fear at 23 a week ago, has nearly tripled to 32 but remains inside its “fear” band, short of the neutral 40 threshold.

Fear And Greed has moved outside Extreme Fear, Source: Fear and Greed Index

Against that technical backdrop, bitcoin has also picked up an unusual tailwind from Washington. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Admiral Samuel Paparo described bitcoin as “a valuable computer science tool, as a power projection,” arguing its proof-of-work architecture imposes cost on would-be attackers and has applications in cybersecurity beyond its monetary use. Pressed by Senator Tommy Tuberville on how Congress should respond to China’s top monetary think tank now treating bitcoin as a strategic asset, Paparo said anything that supports US instruments of national power is a net positive and described bitcoin as a peer-to-peer, zero-trust transfer of value.

Paparo’s remarks echo earlier testimony from US Space Force major Jason Lowery in 2023 that framed proof-of-work as a broader cybersecurity primitive. They also land while legislation is in play. Last month senators Bill Cassidy and Cynthia Lummis introduced the Mined in America Act, which seeks to reshore mining hardware manufacturing and codify President Trump’s executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The US already holds the largest sovereign bitcoin position and controls the dominant share of global hashrate, though it remains heavily reliant on foreign-manufactured mining rigs — a supply-chain exposure that has drawn increasing national-security scrutiny.

For now, those structural tailwinds are running up against a market still working through an overhang of trapped short-term holders. Traders looking for a cleaner directional signal will want to see bitcoin close a weekly candle above $79,200, the Bull Score Index push above 60 rather than settle at the neutral line, and funding rates normalise into positive territory without undoing the rally. Absent those confirmations, the path of least resistance is sideways — and Moreno’s March 2022 comparison will continue to do the rounds.