Through most of June and July, bitcoin languished below $65,000. The token now changes hands at $77,412 after a weekly gain of more than 23% — and one of the managers overseeing $3.8 billion in crypto assets argues the bid isn’t coming from retail.
Speaking to CNBC in a Friday interview, Cosmo Jiang, a portfolio manager at the American investment firm Pantera Capital, said “smart money” is flooding into the space. As for what comes next, he sees resistance near $80,000 and allows for a modest pullback before that level is reached.
The positioning flip is the actual story
Anyone can throw out a price target. The more concrete claim Jiang made — and the harder one to wave away — concerned a shift in how funds are positioned.
“From everything we see, positioning is starting to reverse,” Jiang said.
“People are going from very much on the sidelines and even net short positioning to now realizing they want to be long, for what could be a very big technology.”
Flipping from net short to long carries more weight than idle cash finally stepping in. Traders who had wagered against bitcoin were forced to reverse their view, and closing those bets meant some of them had to buy. That fuel is a different sort from fresh enthusiasm.
Two pieces of news did the heavy lifting
Nothing about the week’s rally was spontaneous. Washington supplied both catalysts, and neither one turned on crypto’s own mechanics.
Earlier in the week, President Donald Trump sat down with crypto executives and pressed lawmakers to finally push the long-awaited Clarity Act across the finish line. The bill is designed to spell out which digital assets fall under SEC oversight and which fall to the CFTC — clarity the industry’s bigwigs have sought for years. A vote on the proposed law is now set to proceed in September.
Bitcoin surged on Trump’s comments.
On that same day, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his department would at minimum double the scale of its long-dated bond buybacks. That sent non-yielding assets — bitcoin and gold among them — higher. One distinction worth holding onto: when gold rallies alongside bitcoin, the trade is a macro one rather than a crypto one. Bitcoin found a bid for the same reason the metal did — it pays no interest.
The fundamentals list is broad, which cuts both ways
Explaining why he thinks the rebound has legs, Jiang rattled off a slew of positive fundamentals across the crypto space: stablecoin adoption, prediction markets, perpetual futures and “the crossover of AI.”
Three of those four describe activity built on crypto rails, not activity that obliges anyone to hold bitcoin itself. Stablecoin volume, prediction markets and perps could each expand without bitcoin budging a dollar. In the interview, Jiang never traced the connection from those trends to bitcoin’s price.
“It’s really hard not to be bullish,” he said.
What to watch instead of the target
Bitcoin had already printed a high of $79,319 earlier Friday, which left Jiang’s $80,000 resistance call roughly $700 from a test at the moment he made it. Either way, that’s a forecast with a short shelf life.
The dated event on this calendar is September’s Clarity Act vote. When a 23% week rests partly on a legislative promise, it is waiting on something specific — and this one has both a month and a name attached. Should the positioning flip Jiang described prove real, that vote is where the market prices it.