American investment firm Pantera Capital says "smart money" is helping push bitcoin's price higher as the cryptocurrency stages a rebound.

Cosmo Jiang, a portfolio manager at the $3.8 billion firm — founded in 2013 as one of the first U.S. investment firms dedicated to digital assets — said in an interview with CNBC on Friday that the next resistance level for the coin's price could be around $80,000. While he acknowledged that a small pullback was possible, he said "smart money" — shorthand for institutional and other well-capitalized investors — was now flooding into the space.

"There's smart money now coming in, and there's real fundamentals to support the rebound in prices," Jiang said in the CNBC interview.

Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) — August 21, 2026

JUST IN: $3.8 billion Pantera Capital tells CNBC the Bitcoin price is starting to "reverse" to the upside "There's smart money now coming in, and there's real fundamentals to support the rebound in prices." pic.twitter.com/278fR8t9vx

"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."

Bitcoin was recently trading at $77,412 after surging more than 23% over the past week. The biggest cryptocurrency rose as high as $79,319 earlier on Friday — just shy of the roughly $80,000 resistance level Jiang flagged. The gains mark a turnaround from June and July, when bitcoin spent most of the period below $65,000; the coin has benefited from news that came out of the White House this week.

The rebound has been fueled by positive regulatory news out of the U.S. President Donald Trump held a meeting with crypto executives earlier in the week and urged lawmakers to get the long-awaited Clarity Act over the line.

The crypto legislation aims to clarify which digital assets fall under the watch of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and has been called for by industry leaders for years amid overlapping agency claims and courtroom fights over whether individual tokens are securities. A vote on the proposed law is now set to go ahead in September, making its progress the next concrete regulatory milestone for markets to watch. Bitcoin surged on Trump's comments.

On the same day, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Treasury Department would at least double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks — purchases intended to support liquidity in longer-maturity Treasuries. Bitcoin and gold — both non-yielding assets — jumped on the news.

Jiang added that a slew of positive fundamentals in the crypto space — including stablecoin adoption, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and what he called "the crossover of AI" — would help push bitcoin's price higher. Stablecoins, tokens pegged to assets such as the U.S. dollar, received their own federal rulebook under the GENIUS Act signed into law in July 2025, while perpetual futures — contracts with no expiry date that account for the bulk of crypto trading volume — and prediction markets have grown into major sectors of the industry.

"It's really hard not to be bullish," he said.

This article is based on a report by Mathew Di Salvo, originally published by Bitcoin Magazine.