Historical replay · BTC/USD
Bitcoin's Three-Session Breakout Through $70,000 (August 2026)
From $62,716 on August 16 to $81,272 on August 25: Bitcoin gained almost 30% in nine days, most of it in three sessions in which at least 55 of the 57 large coins we track rose alongside it.
In mid-August 2026 Bitcoin was going nowhere. It had spent most of the month between about $62,500 and $64,500, and over the weekend of August 15-16 Binance's BTC market traded only $300-340 million a day, roughly a third of a normal weekday. The replay opens on August 16; the window's low, $62,716, came at 22:00 UTC that evening.
The first sign of life came on August 17, a 2.6% gain to $64,532 on $909 million of trading. Then three sessions reshaped the chart. On August 19 Bitcoin rose 7.1% and touched exactly $70,000; the hour from 15:00 UTC alone added 4.0% on $628 million, more than the whole of the previous Sunday. On August 20 it gained another 5.3%, closing at $73,025. On August 21 it added 7.3%, reaching $79,500 and closing at $78,338 on $3.4 billion of trading, about ten times the weekend pace of a week earlier.
It wasn't a Bitcoin-only event. On August 19 and 21, all 57 of the large coins we track closed higher, and on August 20, 55 of them did. The median coin gained 11.2% on August 21 alone. When nearly everything rises together like that, the driver is usually a change in the whole market's appetite for risk, not news about a single asset.
Then the chart did something typical of a strong breakout: it paused rather than reversed. August 22 and 23 were modest down days, and dips were bought above $75,500. The hourly candles in this stretch are worth studying closely: the largest single-hour drop in the entire window was just 1.7%. Bitcoin touched $80,000 on August 24 and set the window's high of $81,272 at 02:00 UTC on August 25, 29.6% above the August 16 low.
The replay ends on August 26, with BTC around $78,500-79,000. It helps to know what came next. Bitcoin didn't build on those levels right away: for about a month afterwards it moved within a range of roughly $75,000 to $87,400, and in late September it was trading near $83,000. A breakout on broad participation often resets the range a market trades in, rather than starting a straight line up.