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Points of Focus
- ETH’s price hit $2,250 after a 17.3% rise in the last 24 hours.
- Short liquidations reached $2.74 billion, or 91.6% of all positions closed.
- Spot ETH ETFs absorbed $189.15 million on Aug. 19.
Ether (ETH) trades at $2,250, up 17.30% on the day, per CoinGecko data at the time of writing.
The 24-hour range spans $1,905.44 to $2,318.66, with ETH now up 19.98% over the past seven days, outperforming the broader crypto market’s 8.70% weekly gain.
Two mechanisms pushed ETH’s price higher, and they are not the same
The move that produced this level came from two sources with opposite implications for how long it lasts.
CoinGlass recorded $2.99 billion in liquidations across 170,371 traders over 24 hours, $2.74 billion, or 91.6%, of which were short positions. ETH accounted for $1.13 billion, second only to Bitcoin’s (BTC) $1.42 billion. The 12-hour window is more lopsided still, with $1.02 billion in shorts against $109.61 million in longs.
As the market-wide short liquidations climbed above $2.49 billion, this event marked the highest recorded single-day short squeeze event in crypto market history.
Liquidations of that scale manufacture demand from traders who never intended to buy, and that demand disappears once positions are closed.
Spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tell a different story. They absorbed $189.15 million on Aug. 19, the largest single-day figure in at least three weeks and the third consecutive accelerating session after $30.85 million on Aug. 17 and $71.47 million on Aug. 18, per SoSoValue data.
Total value traded jumped to $2.14 billion from $524.73 million the prior day, a fourfold increase, lifting cumulative net inflows to $11.74 billion and total net assets to $12.06 billion. That capital chose to arrive.
The catalyst behind the ETH price came from the bond market
Neither mechanism started on its own.
The US Treasury Department announced on Aug. 19 that it will at least double the maximum size of liquidity-support buyback operations for longer-dated securities, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation across the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors, effective Sept. 9 through Nov. 4.
The announcement followed a selloff that pushed the 30-year yield to 5.34% on Aug. 18, its highest since 2007, and landed the same day total public debt crossed $40 trillion. Thirty-year yields fell nearly 10 basis points on the news.
ETH’s price now rests on five stacked layers of support
The price sits above every moving average (MA) TradingView tracks, and the structure beneath it is unusually dense.
Five levels cluster within $241 of the spot price: the Hull MA at $2,160.54, the 200-day exponential moving average (EMA) at $2,125.12, the Ichimoku Base Line at $2,074.44, the 10-day EMA at $2,010.49, and the 200-day simple moving average (SMA) at $2,003.26.
The 200-day EMA carries the most weight, having capped every advance since ETH began declining last October. It sits $118.90, or 5.3%, below the current price.
The average directional index (ADX) at 22.71 has crossed above 20 for the first time in weeks, marking a trending market rather than the range-bound chop that defined August. Three oscillators push back: The relative strength index (RSI) at 81.14, the Commodity Channel Index at 388.57, and Williams Percent Range at -17.63 all register downward signals, with Stochastic RSI at 98.91.
Whether the ETF bid replaces the liquidation bid will be visible in Thursday’s flow data. That answer arrives well before the Treasury buybacks that started this move even begin on Sept. 9.
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