A weekly momentum divergence formed on the Bitcoin chart ahead of last week’s advance, and the daily reading has since made a move last seen in January 2023.
By Jonatan Randin – Senior Market Analyst at PrimeXBT
Bitcoin (BTC) ran from around $64,000 to just under $80,000 inside four sessions last week. The explanations offered have mostly been the obvious ones. On 19 August the US Treasury said it would at least double the maximum size of its long-end liquidity support buyback operations, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, covering 10 to 20 year and 20 to 30 year securities and running from 9 September through 4 November. Long-dated yields fell. Trump met crypto executives at the White House. The SEC had published its Regulation Crypto Assets proposal the day before.
All of that is real, and all of it landed inside the same handful of sessions.
The weekly chart, though, had been building toward something for months before any of it.
The divergence
Through the first half of 2026, Bitcoin kept making lower lows. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) did not follow. It made higher lows instead.
RSI tracks the momentum behind a move rather than the move itself, so a gap of that kind can indicate selling pressure draining away while price is still technically falling. Traders call it a bullish divergence.
On a 15-minute chart these are everywhere and mean very little. On the weekly, where each candle covers a full seven days of trading, they turn up rarely.
The last one that looked like this ran through the second half of 2022, into the bear market low.
Bitcoin (BTC/USD) weekly, log scale, with RSI. Price made lower lows into late 2022 and again into mid-2026, while RSI made higher lows on both occasions. Source: TradingView
The timing of this is important. The divergence was already on the chart before the Treasury announcement, before the White House meeting, and before the short liquidations.
A move of that size generally needs a catalyst, and last week supplied several. But catalysts land into conditions. The same headlines arriving into a market where momentum was still deteriorating could potentially have produced a much smaller reaction.
The daily chart is doing something rarer
Through mid-August the daily RSI sat in the low 40s while price went sideways in a tight range. Within a handful of sessions it was above 80, peaking close to 90.
Roughly 40 points of travel in under a week.
Now the comparison. December 2022: daily RSI in the low 40s, price compressed, volatility gone. By mid-January 2023 it had reached 87.40.
Bitcoin (BTC/USD) daily with RSI. Late 2022 into January 2023 on the left, August 2026 on the right. Source: TradingView
Side by side, the two are close to interchangeable. A long quiet base, then a vertical expansion in both price and momentum.
None of which is a price target. An overbought RSI is not a sell signal on its own, and momentum can stay stretched for weeks once a trend is properly underway. Plenty of traders have shorted an 80 reading and regretted it.
What can be said is that historically, an extreme move of this kind in RSI has in some cases marked the start of a new trend. Not reliably, and not on any schedule a trader could plan around. But when momentum covers most of its range inside a week, the market is not behaving the way it was a fortnight earlier.
The flow data
The stronger evidence for the constructive case is not technical at all.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs took roughly $1.92 billion over the five sessions to 21 August, their best week of 2026 and their largest since October 2025, according to SoSoValue. Ethereum (ETH) funds added $697.2 million, taking the combined intake to $2.6 billion. Both categories saw inflows on all five days, reversing a $392 million outflow the week before.
Bitcoin also cleared its 200-day moving average, then sitting near $69,000, for the first time in nine months.
Short covering has a natural end point. Once the bearish positions are gone, that bid goes with them. ETF subscriptions are new money, and could potentially prove more durable.
One week settles nothing. Even after that intake, Bitcoin ETFs are still carrying roughly $2.9 billion of net outflows across 2026 as a whole. Ecoinometrics’ flow model currently puts Bitcoin in a supported range of roughly $67,000 to $78,000, with fair value near $72,000, which leaves the current price at the top of what flows alone might justify.
The weekend was also messy. CoinGlass data showed open interest in Bitcoin futures down 2.65% on Sunday, with funding near the 0.01% baseline, which could suggest leverage clearing out rather than reloading.
The divergence stays valid for as long as price holds above the low that formed it. Beyond that, the more useful thing to watch this week is whether the ETF bid returns once the creation channel reopens.
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About PrimeXBT
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