Bitcoin surged more than five percent Friday for the third straight day, boosted by optimism over US cryptocurrency legislation and the US Treasury’s surprise bond-buyback move.

Bitcoin extended its rally into a third straight session on Friday, on track for a weekly gain of around 20% as investor optimism flooded back into crypto markets on the back of Washington’s shifting stance on digital assets and government debt. The token was last seen trading at $75,343.01, up sharply from $62,836.88 at the start of the week — its best weekly performance since February 2024.

The rally began Wednesday when Treasury yields pulled back sharply after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department would at least double the size of its buybacks of long-dated government bonds, raising the cap on liquidity-support operations for securities with 10-to-30-year maturities to more than $4 billion per operation, up from $2 billion previously. The move knocked the 30-year Treasury yield back from a 19-year high of 5.337% to around 5.18-5.19%, easing broader financial conditions and boosting appetite for risk assets like Bitcoin. Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, called the Treasury move “exactly the type of thing Bitcoin loves,” adding that investors should now be positioning for a move to $100,000 by year-end 2026.

Momentum built further on Thursday when President Donald Trump hosted the CEOs of major crypto companies — including Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, Ripple and Chainlink — at a last-minute White House event, urging Congress to pass “a fair version” of the Clarity Act, the crypto market structure bill the industry has been pushing for months. “We need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act,” Trump told the gathering, which came just ahead of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting on Thursday. The Securities and Exchange Commission separately proposed a new “Regulation Crypto Assets” rule that would create exemptions allowing certain crypto investment contracts to be offered publicly, letting issuers raise up to $5 million over four years or $75 million annually subject to disclosure requirements.

The sharp price moves triggered a wave of forced selling among traders betting against the rally. Roughly $2.7 billion in crypto short positions were liquidated over the course of the rally, according to CoinGlass data, with one stretch alone seeing $1.7 billion in liquidations within four hours — intensifying the upward move as exchanges forcibly closed bearish bets. Crypto-linked stocks rallied in tandem: Coinbase and Circle each closed up more than 6% on Thursday, Strategy rose 7.8%, and the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF gained 5.5% in premarket trading Friday. US spot Bitcoin ETFs, which had recently logged net outflows, swung back to net inflows starting August 17, pulling in roughly $1 billion over the following days — their best weekly showing since January.

Ether has outpaced Bitcoin’s gains through the rally, climbing as much as 17-20% at points to touch $2,200-2,357, its highest level since May. Other major tokens including Solana, XRP, Cardano and BNB posted gains ranging from 5% to nearly 18%, while memecoins including Dogecoin and Trump’s own $TRUMP token also advanced.

Despite the rally, Bitcoin remains well below its 2026 high of $94,820 reached in mid-January, and analysts caution the Clarity Act’s chances of passing in the near term remain relatively slim despite the White House push. Some market watchers also note the rally’s dependence on a single well-timed intervention from the Treasury, questioning whether it alone can sustainably anchor lower long-term interest rates going forward.