Bitcoin finished the third quarter up about 43%, its strongest three-month stretch since 2024 and the second-best third quarter since 2013. The gain reverses two straight losing quarters — a 22.2% drop in Q1 and a 14.09% decline in Q2 — that had pushed the price down near $58,600 at the start of July.
Ethereum outperformed Bitcoin as the rebound widened beyond the market leader. Over roughly the same three months through Sept. 29, the Nasdaq gained about 5%, the S&P 500 roughly 4%, and gold less than 2%.
The Treasury backstop that wasn't
Bitcoin's advance accelerated after Aug. 19, even as a Treasury initiative meant to improve liquidity in longer-dated government debt failed to keep yields from rising. The department said it would at least double the maximum size of its liquidity-support buybacks for longer maturities to $4 billion per operation, with the bigger purchases starting Sept. 9.
Yields kept climbing anyway. The 10-year Treasury yield rose about 81 basis points over the quarter, and long-dated borrowing costs hit multi-decade highs. Bitcoin has risen almost 30% since the buyback announcement, a stretch that lines up awkwardly with the bond-market stress the program was supposed to ease.
ETFs flip from outflows to a record week
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs swung hard. They sat at roughly $5 billion in year-to-date net outflows at the end of July, then flipped to about $1 billion in inflows by late September — a $6 billion reversal in two months. Last week alone they absorbed $2.39 billion, their biggest weekly intake since October 2025.
The pace is cooling, though. Daily demand fell from $999 million on Sept. 21 to about $135 million by Sept. 25. Bitfinex's gauge of ETF purchases relative to the roughly 450 Bitcoin miners produce each day dropped from 25.6 times issuance during that $999 million session to 1.8 times by Sept. 29. That's a sharp normalization in a market that had been leaning on funds for marginal buying.
Leverage drains out of futures
Aggregate Bitcoin futures open interest slid from more than 700,000 BTC on Sept. 21 to about 644,000, the lowest since early January. The seven-day contraction of roughly 49,000 BTC was the largest since October 2025. CME open interest alone fell 16,075 BTC on Monday, its third-biggest daily decline on record.
Futures premiums have compressed and implied volatility sits near a one-year low. Bitcoin retreated from its Sept. 21 high near $87,400, and the options and futures picture suggests traders have stepped back from chasing the move.
A seller wall above $85,000
Supply positioning matters here. Bitfinex estimates the amount of Bitcoin with a cost basis between $82,500 and $84,000 nearly tripled to 306,000 tokens in three days, and that investors hold about 1.39 million BTC acquired between $84,000 and $86,500 — a potential seller wall above $85,000. Clusters also sit near $63,000–$65,000 and $77,000–$80,000.
The longer-term picture is steadier. CryptoQuant said Bitcoin reclaimed its 365-day moving average last week for the first time since March 2023, and its realized price — an approximation of the average cost basis of coins in circulation — has climbed to about $77,000 and held through the recovery.
The next test is whether ETF demand stabilizes near recent daily levels or keeps sliding back toward the outflow pattern that defined July. This week's flow prints will say a lot about which side of $85,000 the market ends up trading.
