Pantera Capital’s Cosmo Jiang says ‘smart money’ is behind bitcoin’s rebound

Bitcoin sat under $65,000 for most of June and July. It’s now trading at $77,412, up more than 23% in a week, and one of the people managing $3.8 billion in crypto assets says the buyers driving it aren’t retail.

Cosmo Jiang, portfolio manager at American investment firm Pantera Capital, told CNBC in a Friday interview that “smart money” is flooding into the space. His read on where the price goes next: resistance around $80,000, with a small pullback possible before then.

The positioning flip is the actual story

Price targets are cheap. What Jiang described in more specific terms was a change in how funds are positioned, which is harder to hand-wave.

“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.”

Net short to long is a bigger move than sideline money deciding to buy. It means traders who were betting against bitcoin had to change their minds, and some of them had to buy to close those positions. That’s a different kind of fuel than fresh enthusiasm.

Two pieces of news did the heavy lifting

The week’s move wasn’t spontaneous. Both catalysts came out of Washington, and neither had much to do with crypto’s own mechanics.

President Donald Trump met with crypto executives earlier in the week and urged lawmakers to get the long-awaited Clarity Act over the line. The legislation aims to make it clear which digital assets the SEC and CFTC will watchdog, something industry bigwigs have been asking for for years. A vote will now go ahead on the proposed law in September.

Bitcoin surged on Trump’s comments.

The same day, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department would at least double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. Non-yielding assets including bitcoin and gold jumped on that one. Worth keeping straight: gold moving in step with bitcoin points at a macro trade, not a crypto trade. Bitcoin caught a bid because it doesn’t pay interest, same as the metal.

The fundamentals list is broad, which cuts both ways

Jiang pointed to a slew of positive fundamentals in the crypto space to explain why this rebound has legs. He named stablecoin adoption, prediction markets, perpetual futures and “the crossover of AI.”

Three of those four are things people do with crypto rails rather than things that require anyone to own bitcoin specifically. Stablecoin volume, prediction markets and perps can all grow without bitcoin moving a dollar. Jiang didn’t draw the line from those to bitcoin’s price in the interview.

“It’s really hard not to be bullish,” he said.

What to watch instead of the target

Bitcoin touched as high as $79,319 earlier Friday, so Jiang’s $80,000 resistance level was already within about $700 of being tested when he said it. That’s a call with a short shelf life either way.

The September Clarity Act vote is the dated event on this calendar. A 23% week built partly on a legislative promise has a specific thing it’s waiting for, and that thing has a month and a name. If the positioning flip Jiang described is real, that vote is where it gets priced.