Crypto Market Tops $3 Trillion Again as Bitcoin Nears $87,000, a Week After the Senate Killed a Regulation Bill

Since the U.S. Treasury Department announced expanded buybacks of long-dated bonds on August 19, the altcoin market has grown 33%, according to Glassnode data cited by TradingView. This single policy move shaped crypto market activity on Tuesday, September 22.

The total cryptocurrency market capitalization briefly crossed $3 trillion before settling just below it, up about 4.3% over 24 hours, according to Cointelegraph. Bitcoin traded near $86,000, up roughly 4.5%, and briefly touched $87,395 during the session, its highest level since January 2026, according to Pluang. That's still well short of Bitcoin's contribution to the roughly $4.4 trillion total crypto market cap the industry hit at its all-time peak in late 2025, so Tuesday's move is a recovery, not a new record.

The Rest of the Board

Altcoins moved even harder than Bitcoin in percentage terms. Dogecoin jumped about 11%, XRP gained 5.7% to $1.53, Ether rose 2.3% to $2,745, Solana added 3.6% to $117, and BNB ticked up 1.6%, according to CoinGecko figures reported by Cointelegraph. Further down the list, a token called Akedo ($AKE) gained roughly 170% over the past week, hit an all-time high of $0.1467 on Sunday, September 20, then fell more than 60% from that peak, per Cointelegraph.

Glassnode's Altcoin Cycle Signal, which tracks the 250 largest cryptocurrencies against Bitcoin, flipped to favor altcoin outperformance this week, hitting 81.25 on its 0-100 scale, according to TradingView. Bitcoin's share of the total market has stayed roughly flat since August, sitting at 59.7% versus 59.2% on August 19, well below the 66% dominance level it hit in June 2025. Trader Matthew Hyland called this pattern "complacency" among Bitcoin holders in comments cited by TradingView.

Where the Money Came From

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs took in roughly $999 million in net inflows on Monday, September 21, the largest single-day haul since October 2025, according to Farside Investors data reported by TradingView. Ether ETFs pulled in another $270 million, also their biggest day since October 2025. Bitcoin ETF investors' average cost basis sits just below $86,000, meaning the current price is roughly where the typical ETF buyer got in, not deep in profit territory.

Leverage climbed alongside the rally. Open interest in crypto perpetual futures rose to about $160 billion, the highest since late October 2025, according to Coinglass data cited by Crypto Briefing. More than $920 million in short positions got forcibly liquidated on Monday as prices surged, a cascade that can accelerate a price move well beyond what spot buying alone would produce. High leverage isn't automatically a red flag, but it does mean any reversal from here would hit harder than the same percentage drop with lighter positioning would.

The Regulatory Fight Nobody in the Rally Is Talking About

While crypto-focused outlets covering Tuesday's rally didn't mention it, the market's biggest legislative opportunity in years collapsed exactly one week earlier. On September 15, the Senate voted 49-50 against invoking cloture on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a comprehensive regulatory framework that cleared the Banking Committee back in May, according to the Epoch Times. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) switched his vote from yes to no at the last moment, and Republicans came up short of the 60 votes needed with at least seven Democrats required to break a filibuster.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) argued the bill wasn't partisan, noting Democrats had secured more than 100 concessions and authored roughly half of its 630 pages. "It's a vote against the consumer protections American families are counting on," she said on the Senate floor, adding that failure would hand the digital-asset industry to foreign competitors.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) argued the opposite, saying on September 14 that the bill would "turbocharge President Donald Trump's ability to rake in billions and billions of dollars from crypto" while ordinary Americans face an affordability crisis. Separately, banks told lawmakers they couldn't support the bill unless it curbed interest-style payouts on stablecoins, warning those payouts could drain traditional deposits into higher-yield crypto accounts. Republicans added language letting state attorneys general impose ethics requirements on federal officials, a provision Lummis said President Trump endorsed, but it wasn't enough to flip the needed Democratic votes.

No new cloture vote has been scheduled. The industry that just added $740 billion in value in five weeks is still operating in the same regulatory vacuum it was in before the vote failed.