Bitcoin Rockets to $94,000 — Why This Rally Feels Different

Not just ETFs: the nerdy plumbing that actually moved the market

Yes, ETFs scooped up about $1.2 billion in the first couple trading days of 2026 and that headline makes for a tidy story. But if you peek under the hood you’ll see the real drivers aren’t just fund flows — they’re the strange little mechanics of options and dealer hedging that turn tiny bets into big moves.

Around the start of January, the options market flipped a subtle but meaningful signal: traders started paying more to buy upside exposure than to insure against a drop. In plain English, bets on a farther-up price got pricier than bets against it. That’s a crowd-sourced shout that people expect the price to go up, and it matters because of how market makers hedge.

When dealers sell those upside contracts, they don’t just sit on the risk — they hedge by buying spot or futures. As prices tick up, that hedging becomes buying pressure, which nudges the price higher and forces more hedging. It’s the classic feedback loop: sentiment → options demand → hedging flows → price move. So while ETFs gave a visible shove, the options plumbing helped the market build its own staircase.

Supply shifts, short squeezes, and the safety-net of low leverage

There was also a quieter rearrangement of who holds what. Large, top-heavy holdings thinned out noticeably as concentrated owners distributed coins to buyers who weren’t immediately flipping them for quick gains. At the same time, on-chain measures of realized profit-taking cratered — meaning far fewer people were sitting on easy profits to sell and cap the rally.

Futures markets pitched in a classic short squeeze: hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidations hit in a day, and most of it came from shorts getting forced out. But—and this is important—the squeeze happened in a low-leverage environment. Overall leverage across crypto and futures was well below past extremes, so the unwind removed selling pressure without creating a ticking time bomb of forced liquidations on the long side.

Put those pieces together and you get a neat picture: options repriced upside demand, supply moved into hands less eager to sell, and leverage stayed compressed. That combination makes gains stickier — ETF flows were a catalyst and a headline, but the structural setup had already been lining up.

Short version: ETFs brought buyers, but the real firepower came from options dynamics, redistributed supply, and a low-leverage market that turned small pushes into a durable rally. Enjoy the fireworks, but keep your helmet on — markets still love surprises.