Bitcoin traded at $71,556 on Thursday, up 3.26% on the day and moving within a $68,858–$72,408 band, as bulls attempt to break the bearish trend for the first time in months. The move extends Wednesday's 8.7% surge—Bitcoin's sharpest rally in five months, its strongest one-day jump since March 4, and its highest price since June 1.

Sentiment across the market has clearly shifted, but traders on prediction markets don't appear convinced just yet.

Prediction markets turn crowd bets into live odds. Because each contract pays a fixed amount only if a defined price threshold is hit, the quoted odds can be read as the crowd's real-money probability of that specific outcome rather than a general mood. On Myriad, a market run by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, traders were leaning roughly 70% toward a dump to $55,000 just days ago. By Wednesday afternoon, the odds in the "pump to $84K or dump to $55K" market had collapsed to a near coin flip: about 52% on the bullish $84K side and 48% on the bearish $55K.

The skepticism isn't uniform, and odds vary across platforms. Polymarket's flagship 2026 price market—the exchange returned to the U.S. in 2025 after acquiring a CFTC-licensed platform—was pricing a 56% chance that BTC touches $55,000 before year-end and just 51% odds of a run to $75,000 as of last week. On Kalshi, an exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, traders gave Bitcoin only a 54% shot at clearing $67,500 in August and 31% at $70,000—both thresholds the rally blew through on Wednesday. A separate Polymarket contract put BTC above $75,000 for August at 47% on roughly $12 million in volume.

The near-term markets got squeezed while the year-end ones barely moved. Prediction markets have been setting volume records as more traders hedge real positions with them, a mainstream turn that followed the 2024 U.S. presidential election, when Polymarket's race odds were widely tracked. That real-money hedging is what makes the Myriad flip less a forecast than a recap of who got caught blindsided.

For Bitcoin traders, the next line in the sand sits at $70,284, the lower edge of a resistance band on Bitcoin's chart. A daily close above it opens room toward $73,245; losing $68,000 would drag Bitcoin back inside the range that has trapped it since June—the same compressive wedge that preceded crashes in October 2025 and January 2026.

Myriad's market doesn't expire on a calendar. It resolves the moment Binance's BTC/USDT spot price touches either $84,000 or $55,000. Live odds on Myriad currently place a 52% chance on a bullish outcome, so despite Bitcoin's impressive two-day run, traders appear—at best—cautiously optimistic.