Bitcoin jumped back over the $91,000 mark over the weekend, continuing an early-year rebound as a sudden geopolitical tension in Venezuela caused volatility to sweep across world markets and triggered a wave of short liquidations across crypto derivatives.
The shift highlighted the ease with which thin liquidity and crowded positioning can hasten price action in accelerating price movement, although the catalyst driving such a move is a political, and not a crypto-specific factor.
The largest digital asset in the world rose to an approximate of 91,300 in the Asian trading hours on Sunday, the highest point since mid-December, and increased by over four per cent in the previous week.
The surge extended to other major altcoins, with ether climbing to around $3,150, solana up over 1.5 percent on the day, and XRP and Cardano also recording strong weekly gains. The broad-based gains came after an abrupt liquidation flush that reset leverage following weeks of careful range-bound trading.
The immediate trigger, which market participants cited, was the soaring headlines in Venezuela. It was reported that President Nicolás Maduro had been taken into US custody after the statements by President Donald Trump indicating that Washington might take control over the country and its oil assets, stating that the global markets would stabilize before risk appetite.
Although crypto assets are not directly affected by Venezuelan politics, traders mitigate the volatility events caused by fast-moving geopolitics by often viewing them as catalysts that can trigger positioning and move prices across key technical levels.
According to the data on derivatives, Bitcoin was the biggest forced unwind throughout the market. Coinglass reported that approximately $180 million of crypto futures positions were liquidated in the last 24 hours, with an estimated $133 million of that amount consisting of shorts.
The total liquidations in bitcoin outnumbered more than $58 million in short positions compared to less than $6 million in longs, which is a strong indicator that fresh spot buying was not the primary factor behind the move; it is traders scrambling to hedge negative bets as prices rose.
One of the derivatives strategists quoted by CoinDesk, citing that escalation had rebuilt at Bitcoin’s recent consolidation, reported that “This was a classic short squeeze. Once the price reclaimed a widely watched moving average, stops started to cascade. In this kind of environment, it doesn’t take much demand to force a sharp repricing.”
Eventually, the technical factors were in the limelight. A move to the upside above its 50-day moving average was a significant psychological milestone and chart signal, as Bitcoin had been unable to maintain its rallies in weeks.
Derivatives trader Heisenberg wrote on X that reclaim enhances short-term structure but cautioned that the bulls first had to crack the next band of resistance to verify follow-through. He warned that the market could be vulnerable to a deeper pullback toward the mid-$70,000s.
Meanwhile, the indicators of sentiment were not euphoric but rather carefully optimistic. Retail sentiment around Bitcoin on Stocktwits was solidly bullish, but it has been called “normal” in terms of volume of messages, implying that the rally was not raising an animalistic spurt of speculative talk.
That relative calm might be one of the reasons the move was such a positioning-sensitive one; with a smaller number of participants acting on it, the price action was dominated by leveraged traders responding to headlines and technical triggers.
Analysts also pointed out that the reaction of Bitcoin to geopolitical tension has changed. In previous cycles, digital assets have been presented as a crisis hedge, but currently instead tend to be high-beta risk assets, particularly in the short term.
In a recent note, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst said, “Crypto doesn’t rally because of Venezuela per se. It rallies because sudden uncertainty forces repositioning, and when shorts are crowded, the path of least resistance is higher.”
Bitcoin is heading into the new year following a chequered close to 2025, with macroeconomic confusion, changing expectations of the US monetary policy, and disproportionate liquidity situations in markets around the world.
Within this kind of environment, traders move fast to fade rallies that are not confirmed, but move fast to cover when major levels are broken.
Analysts observed that whether Bitcoin can extend this recovery will probably be determined by how well it can withstand the regained technical support and whether it can gain sustained spot demand instead of being propelled by liquidation support.
It further reported that in the meantime, the weekend spike is a reminder that in crypto markets, geopolitics, leverage, and psychology can intersect unexpectedly, and a terse consolidation may turn into a fast and dramatic action.
