Two blows, one build: bitcoin through the Clarity vote, the Fed hike and $80K
The Clarity Act failed and the Fed hiked for the first time since 2023. Bitcoin went on to $81K anyway. Open interest in coins shows who built it.
Data window: 14 to 19 September 2026 · BTC perpetual futures on Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid · MarketTrace 15-minute state archive and consolidated candles · last pull 19 September 2026, 15:20 UTC. Descriptive microstructure, not financial advice.
Two things that were supposed to hurt bitcoin arrived a day apart. The crypto industry's market-structure bill lost its first procedural vote in the Senate, and the Federal Reserve started hiking again. By Saturday bitcoin traded at $81,600, above where it stood before either. Several outlets filed Friday's jump under "short squeeze" (Bitcoin.com, for one).
The perp tape says otherwise, but only if you count open interest in coins instead of dollars. Dollar open interest rises with price even when nobody opens a position; our study of 136,000 hours of open interest found its 24-hour changes have a 0.67 correlation with price on Binance BTC, against 0.19 for open interest in coins. Every open interest figure below is in coins unless it says otherwise.
Three events side by side
| Clarity vote, Tue 15 Sep | Fed hike, Wed 16 Sep | US open, Fri 18 Sep | August squeeze, 19 Aug | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Window (UTC) | 18:30 to 19:15 | 17:45 to 20:15 | 13:30 to 14:45 | 15:00 to 16:15 |
| Price | −1.2% | +1.0% | +3.3% | +4.0% |
| Open interest in coins | +1.9% | +0.7% | +2.7% | −1.9% |
| Open interest in dollars | +0.6% | +1.7% | +6.1% | +2.0% |
| Largest 30-minute net taker flow | −$639M | −$109M | +$972M | +$2.22B |
| Peak liquidation hour | $55.2M, 92% longs | $18.5M, 51% longs | $72.1M, 99% shorts | $450.5M, 99% shorts |
Open interest in coins is consolidated dollar open interest across Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid divided by the consolidated price at each 15-minute snapshot. Net taker flow is aggressive buy volume minus aggressive sell volume across the four venues in a 30-minute window; for the Fed column it is the largest window after the 18:00 release. Liquidations are trailing one-hour readings on Binance, Bybit and OKX; our liquidation feed does not cover Hyperliquid, so treat them as floors.
BTC perpetual futures on Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid, 15-minute snapshots, 14 to 19 September 2026, UTC. Open interest in coins is dollar open interest divided by price. Hover or use ←/→ to scrub, click to pin.
- Time
- Sat 19 Sep 14:00 UTC
- Price
- $81,336
- Open interest
- 238,844 BTC
- Since Monday 00:00
- +8.0%
Data at the three events
| Window (UTC) | Event | Price | Open interest, BTC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tue 15 18:30 → 19:15 | Clarity vote | $76,874 → $75,936 | 225,069 → 229,252 |
| Wed 16 17:45 → 20:15 | Fed hike | $75,434 → $76,182 | 229,652 → 231,360 |
| Fri 18 13:30 → 17:00 | US open | $78,152 → $80,831 | 232,125 → 241,969 |
Read the coin row first, because it is the only one that says whether positions were opened or closed. In dollars all four windows show open interest going up. In coins three of them do. The one that doesn't is August, the only window here where forced buying outran new positions.
Tuesday: the vote
The market sold most of the Clarity news before the roll call. Polymarket's odds of passage slipped from 18% to 14% between 06:30 and 14:00 UTC, the US 10-year yield touched 5.04% (CoinDesk live), and bitcoin fell from Monday evening's $79,577 to $75,557 by 15:00 UTC.
The overnight part of that slide was almost all price. Between 20:30 on Monday and 08:00 on Tuesday dollar open interest dropped $715M, which reads like traders leaving, but open interest in coins moved only 0.9%. Then the pattern flipped. From 08:00 to 15:00 open interest in coins rose 4.5%, spread across all four venues, while price kept sliding. Adding positions into a falling price is what futures textbooks call a short buildup. Our open interest study found the label describes who traded and says nothing about what comes next. Here it was followed by one more flush and then a 9% rally.
Voting on roll call 234 opened at 18:18 UTC (Senate floor log): cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, with 60 votes needed. It failed 49 to 50 (senate.gov). Four Republicans voted no, and Democrats said the bill's ethics clause did not go far enough given the Trump family's crypto earnings (NPR). As the no votes passed 40 (Decrypt), bitcoin dropped from $76,874 to $75,744 in fifteen minutes and printed $74,897 inside the hour on our consolidated tape.
This was the week's sharpest selling. Net taker flow hit −$639M in the half hour to 19:00. Displayed bids within 10 bps of mid thinned to $27.6M, about half the week's median of $52M. Liquidations peaked at $55.2M over the trailing hour, 92% of it longs, and the hour traded about 12 times its trailing seven-day median volume.
Open interest in coins went up anyway: +1.9% in 45 minutes. The flush forced some longs out and brought in more new positions than it removed. By midnight bitcoin sat near $75,600 with more open contracts than it had before the vote.
Wednesday: the hike everyone expected
The Fed raised the funds rate by 25 bp to 3.75 to 4.00%, unanimously, its first increase since 26 July 2023 (Federal Reserve). CME FedWatch had put the odds at about 92% that morning (Cointribune) and 88% twenty minutes before the release (CoinDesk live). The projections put the median end-2026 rate at 4.1%, with 16 of 18 officials pencilling in at least one more hike this year (SEP), and Kevin Warsh told the press conference he was "not in the forward guidance business" (transcript). The Dow closed down 1.2% and the S&P 500 0.4% (Yahoo Finance), and the 10-year went back to 5% (Benzinga).
On the perp book the release mostly pulled liquidity. At the 18:00 snapshot, displayed depth within 10 bps was $18.8M on the bid, about a third of the week's median, and $26.6M on the ask, about half. The 18:00 hour traded 95,788 BTC across the four venues, close to the vote hour's 103,380, inside a range of $75,000 to $76,547. Liquidations topped out at $18.5M over the trailing hour and split 51% longs, 49% shorts. Open interest in coins rose 0.7% into the evening.
The Fed's first hike in three years forced less money out of positions than a failed procedural vote in the Senate. On a perp tape, that is what a 90% priced decision looks like.
Friday: a squeeze that turned into a build
Thursday brought a five-year SEC exemption for trading tokenized stocks (SEC) and $159.5M of spot ETF inflows. Friday opened with a Bank of Japan hike to 1.25% (FXStreet), and then the US session started.
Between 13:30 and 14:45 UTC bitcoin went from $78,152 to $80,766. Net taker buying hit +$972M in the 30 minutes to 14:00, with every venue on the same side: Binance +$351M, OKX +$280M, Bybit +$182M, Hyperliquid +$157M. Liquidations ran at $60M to $72M over the trailing hour, 99% of them shorts, and CoinGlass counted about $119M of BTC liquidations in the hour across its wider venue list (Yahoo Finance). Spot ETFs took in $433M that day (Farside).
The first quarter hour was a squeeze: open interest in coins dipped 0.65% while $28M of shorts were liquidated. After that the positions grew. Open interest in coins was up 2.7% by 14:45 and 4.2% by 17:00, about 9,800 BTC of new positions, roughly $796M at Friday's prices, in three and a half hours. When a squeeze runs, shorts get liquidated or cover, and each of those closes a position, so open interest falls. That is what August looked like. In the quarter hour to 15:30 UTC on 19 August open interest in coins fell 5.5%, while the trailing hour's liquidations reached $437M, 99% of them shorts.
Rising open interest means the new buyers met sellers who stayed in the trade: fresh shorts, or market makers and basis desks opening positions against the flow. The tape can't separate those. It can show how little was closed by force: $72M an hour at the peak on Binance, Bybit and OKX, against about $464M of new positions on those same three venues and another $331M on Hyperliquid. Basis never turned positive during the move (−0.6 to −3.9 bps against the Binance spot index), so perps did not run ahead of spot the way they briefly did at August's top.
Hyperliquid led the build
Share of BTC perpetual open interest on Monday 00:00 UTC, against each venue's share of the positions added by Saturday 13:30 UTC. Both in coins.
Hover a bar for its value.
Data
| Venue | Share of OI, Mon | Change in coins | BTC added | Share of positions added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | 47.5% | +2.9% | 3,080 | 17.1% |
| Bybit | 24.2% | +7.5% | 4,017 | 22.3% |
| OKX | 12.6% | +11.1% | 3,095 | 17.2% |
| Hyperliquid | 15.8% | +22.4% | 7,817 | 43.4% |
| Venue | Share of BTC perp open interest, Mon 00:00 | Change in coins, Mon to Sat | Share of positions added, week | Share added in the 15h before Friday's open | Share added, Fri 13:30 to 17:00 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | 47.5% | +2.9% | 17% | −12% | 25% |
| Bybit | 24.2% | +7.5% | 22% | 27% | 20% |
| OKX | 12.6% | +11.1% | 17% | 6% | 13% |
| Hyperliquid | 15.8% | +22.4% | 43% | 79% | 42% |
All venues: 221,100 BTC on Monday 00:00 UTC to 239,100 BTC on Saturday 13:30 UTC, +8.1%. The pre-open window runs from 22:30 UTC Thursday to 13:30 UTC Friday. Shares of a net change can be negative when a venue shrank.
One venue led the build. Hyperliquid started the week with 15.8% of BTC perpetual open interest and took 43% of the positions added by Saturday. In the 15 hours before Friday's US open, while open interest on Binance shrank, Hyperliquid added about 3,060 BTC, 79% of the net build across all four venues. From 14:15 to 17:00 its price sat 2.4 to 5.4 bps above the consolidated mid, against a week median of 0.7 bps: buyers on that venue were paying up.
There is one more Hyperliquid detail from Friday morning. Between 11:30 and 13:15 UTC, total displayed bids within 10 bps of mid read $190M to $258M in six of our eight snapshots, 3.7 to 5 times the week's median. In each of those six, Hyperliquid's book imbalance read +0.80 to +0.86, while the other three venues sat between −0.21 and +0.26. At 13:30 the extra bids were gone and the move began. A snapshot every 15 minutes can't tell whether that size was filled, pulled or moved up the book; our piece on fake walls explains why a depth feed alone never can.
HYPE, the venue's own token, printed a record above $92 the same afternoon (CoinDesk live) and traded above $94 overnight on our feed.
A correction to our August post
Our anatomy of the August squeeze said open interest rose 18.1% from trough to top and that the squeeze "converted into a standing position base". Those were dollar figures. In coins, open interest fell 4.1% from the 19 August trough to the 21 August top, and 8.2% by the next morning. On net the August move closed positions, which is what squeezes do. We wrote that piece before our open interest study showed how much dollar open interest tracks price. This post uses coins throughout, and we have added a note to the August one.
What the week says
The two policy shocks' worst liquidation hours added up to $74M on the three venues we can see. Spot ETF flows netted +$6.1M over the five sessions: +$159.9M on Monday, −$450.4M on the vote, −$295.9M on the hike, +$159.5M on Thursday and +$433.0M on Friday (Farside). Through all of it, open interest in coins grew 8.1%.
That is a market that had priced the bad news before it arrived, as the 14% Clarity odds and the 88 to 92% hike odds both said, and that used both dips to add positions. It also means more open contracts, and more leverage that can be forced out, going into next week than there were going into this one.
Our open interest study found that the size of a build says something about how big the next move will be and nothing about which way it goes. Measured the way that study measures it, on Binance alone, in coins, over 24 hours, Friday's build was ordinary: +1.7%, the seventh decile, where the median next-day range was 3.7%. Most of this build happened on venues a Binance-only study doesn't see. The 24 hours after the breakout window ran a 1.65% range, $80,468 to $81,799.
Where the tape is now
As of 19 September, 15:20 UTC:
| Metric | Reading |
|---|---|
| Price | $81,649 |
| Open interest | $19.64B, or 240,500 BTC (0.6% below Friday's 17:00 peak) |
| Funding | 0.97 bps per 8h, 81st percentile of two years, positive for 272 hours |
| Liquidations, past 24h | $33.5M, 87% shorts |
| Volume | 1.2x the weekly median |
| Basis | −6.1 bps |
| Displayed depth within 10 bps | $46.1M bid, $38.6M ask |
Funding at the 80th percentile or higher has come up often in the past two years, and what followed was flat. Over 72 hours 47% of episodes finished higher, the median return was −0.20% and the median drawdown along the way was 3.1% (49 non-overlapping episodes, conditional outcomes). Our funding study measured the top decile, the 90th percentile and above, and found a bearish tilt there (72-hour median −1.18%, 40.5% of episodes up). Today's reading is below that line.
What is on the calendar
Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington runs from 23 to 25 September (AP). Quarterly options expire on Deribit on 25 September at 08:00 UTC, with about $14.7B of BTC notional open as of 15 September (crypto.news). August PCE inflation comes out on 30 September.
The Clarity Act is not formally dead. Senator Tillis entered a motion to reconsider right after the vote (Senate floor log), but no new vote is scheduled, the House has cancelled its sessions for the weeks of 21 and 28 September and the Senate leaves on 5 October ahead of the 3 November election (CoinDesk).
Method and limits
Open interest in coins is consolidated dollar open interest divided by the consolidated price at each 15-minute snapshot. Venue shares use each venue's dollar open interest divided by the same price. Hyperliquid's own mark sat a few bps from the consolidated mid, which moves no share by more than a rounding error.
Snapshots are 15 minutes apart, so anything shorter is invisible to the archive. Intrahour extremes, such as the $74,897 low of the vote hour, come from consolidated one-hour candles.
Liquidations are trailing one-hour readings on Binance, Bybit and OKX. Bybit and OKX report bankruptcy prices, so dollar values are estimates, and our liquidation feed does not cover Hyperliquid. After both big bursts the reading fell faster than a strict 60-minute window should, so we quote peaks only. All liquidation figures here are floors.
Net taker flow windows are 30 minutes long and overlap at 15-minute steps. We quote the largest window and never add windows together.
Base rates come from 730 days of cross-venue funding history and from our Binance open interest study (October 2020 to September 2026). They describe what followed similar readings in the past. ETF flows are Farside's daily totals, and news times come from the linked sources, converted to UTC.
Check it yourself
Every number here comes from the feeds that run the site: positioning for open interest and taker flow by venue, liquidations, funding and depth. AI assistants can query the same archive over MCP.
How to cite this post
MarketTrace (2026). "Two blows, one build: bitcoin through the Clarity vote, the Fed hike and $80K." Event study, BTC perpetual futures on Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid, 14 to 19 September 2026. https://markettrace.ai/blog/bitcoin-clarity-act-fed-hike-80k
Frequently asked questions
Why did bitcoin go up after the Fed raised rates?
The hike was priced. CME FedWatch had it at 88 to 92% on the day, and the decision hour kept bitcoin inside $75,000 to $76,547 with $18.5M of liquidations split evenly. The move up came two days later at Friday's US open, when net taker buying reached $972M in 30 minutes, open interest in coins rose 2.7% in 75 minutes and spot ETFs took in $433M.
Did the Clarity Act failure crash bitcoin?
It hit it. Bitcoin slid about 6% from Monday's $79,577 high into the vote and printed $74,897 in the vote hour, with a $55M liquidation hour (92% longs) and −$639M of net taker selling in 30 minutes. Open interest in coins rose during the drop, and price recovered all of it within three days.
Was bitcoin's move above $80,000 a short squeeze?
Only in part. Short liquidations peaked at $72M an hour on Binance, Bybit and OKX, and CoinGlass counted about $119M of BTC liquidations across more venues. The first 15 minutes were a squeeze, with open interest in coins down 0.65%. After that it rose, to +4.2% between 13:30 and 17:00 UTC, so more positions were opened than closed. In August's squeeze, open interest in coins fell.
What is the difference between open interest in coins and in dollars?
Dollar open interest is the number of open contracts multiplied by price. When price rises 3%, dollar open interest rises 3% with no new positions at all. Open interest in coins strips that out, so it shows whether positions were added or closed. On Binance BTC, 24-hour changes in dollar open interest have a 0.67 correlation with price; in coins it is 0.19 (study).
How much was liquidated when bitcoin broke $80,000?
On Binance, Bybit and OKX, trailing one-hour BTC liquidations peaked at $72.1M at 14:30 UTC on 18 September, 99% shorts. CoinGlass, which covers more venues, counted $192M across all crypto in that hour, $183M of it shorts (Yahoo Finance).
What happens next?
MarketTrace doesn't forecast. As of 19 September funding sits at the 81st percentile; over the past two years, BTC readings at the 80th percentile or higher were followed by flat 72-hour returns (47% up, median −0.20%) with a median drawdown of 3.1%. The next scheduled events are Xi Jinping's state visit (23 to 25 September), the quarterly options expiry on 25 September and August PCE on 30 September.
Related
→ Anatomy of a short squeeze: bitcoin's 45-hour run to $79.6K
→ Open interest doesn't predict direction. We checked 136,000 hours.
→ Extreme funding rates: what 789 days of data actually show
Watch the same data we used for this post, live and free: Positioning, Liquidations, Funding and Book depth.