BTC Dropped to a Four-Month Low

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In Today's Note

• BTC fell below $62K, extending its weekly decline to 14.5% as Strategy’s small BTC sale and a record 13-day spot ETF outflow streak continued to weigh on sentiment.
• Crypto majors kept diverging from US equities, with BTC and ETH selling off while parts of the market rotated into HYPE ETFs, tokenised equity perps and pre-IPO perpetuals.
• Goldman Sachs plans to tokenise a real estate fund, while Hyperliquid reached a record share of global perpetual futures volume, Bitmine filed for a preferred stock offering, the UK pushed for faster stablecoin regulation, and Scott Bessent said work on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is still moving forward.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Macro & Markets

• A continued weakening in crypto risk sentiment has seen BTC slump to a four-month low below $62K. 
• Over the course of the past week, BTC has lost 14.5% of its value and is now firmly trading at half its all-time high level.
• ETH is down by 5.8%, now trading below $1,800. 

• The selloff over the past few days initially coincided with an announcement from Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc that the DAT had sold $2.5M worth of its roughly $50B Bitcoin holdings — breaking Saylor’s “never sell” promise. It has also occurred against a backdrop of a continued run of spot ETF outflows which has persisted for 13 consecutive trading sessions — the longest run on record (-$4.4B in outflows).

• US equities snapped their nine-day win streak yesterday as the S&P 500 fell 0.74% and the Nasdaq-100 declined 0.29%. Nonetheless, we’ve highlighted in previous editions that sentiment in BTC and ETH has diverged away from US risk-on tech stocks and benchmark equity indexes. 
• However, this divergence in performance is not just limited to BTC and US equities — rather we see evidence of a capital rotation or at the very least, speculative froth, in other areas of the crypto market, albeit not in the majors BTC and ETH. 

• Hyperliquid’s native HYPE token stands out as one example: year-to-date the token is up 166%, with the most recent leg up in spot price being driven by the launch of spot HYPE ETFs. These products have seen $145M of inflows since their launch in mid-May. 
• Additionally, we also find evidence of crypto-native traders increasingly turning towards tokenised equity perps for risk-exposure, rather than BTC or ETH. 
• Total daily volumes on the three largest US equity perps on Hyperliquid sits at $1.3B per day combined; split between ~$595M/24h on xyz:XYZ100 (a NDX/QQQ equivalent), ~$370M/24h on xyz:SP500 (the SPX-equivalent) and ~$322M/24h on xyz:CL (WTI crude). 
• Over the last 30 days these three tickers alone cumulatively traded $27.1B of notional — equivalent to 112% of Hyperliquid’s ETH perp volume and 38% of its BTC perp volume. 

• Traders are also turning to another corner of the market: pre-IPO’s. 
• On a 7-day rolling window, the ratio of pre-IPO perp volume, which provides traders exposure to private companies such as SpaceX and Anthropic to ETH notional perp volume has increased from a small 0.1% to a peak closer to 3.0%. 

• The fall in US equities from their record highs coincided with a leg higher up in oil prices and US treasury yields, as concerns that an escalation between Lebanon and Israel could impede on an interim US-Iran peace agreement. 
• The White House said that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a ceasefire, contingent on “a complete cessation” of attacks by Hezbollah. 
• The statement said “Israel and Lebanon reaffirmed that they have no hostile intent toward one another and committed to continuing direct negotiations to build confidence, resolve all outstanding issues, and work toward a comprehensive agreement between the two countries”.

• The US House also passed a resolution yesterday aiming to limit Trump's war powers against Iran. 
• Democrats have repeatedly called for resolutions to cut Trump's powers in both the House and the Senate – the most recent 215 to 208 vote marks the first time such a measure has cleared the House or the Senate on a final vote since the war began. 
• Back in mid-May, the Senate passed a similar resolution on a procedural vote — a preliminary vote that allowed the measure to move forward, rather than the final vote needed to pass the legislation itself. 

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto3

• Goldman Sachs has announced plans to tokenize a real estate fund in collaboration with Apex Group and Archax.
• The fund will use Goldman Sachs’ Digital Asset Platform, GS DAP, to issue tokenized fund interests, with Ownera and LRC Group also involved in the project. 
• The initiative combines a traditional fund structure with blockchain-based issuance, aiming to improve operational efficiency, transparency, and the potential for smoother asset transfers in the future.

• Hyperliquid has reached a record share of the global perpetual futures market, with monthly volume equal to 6.63% of all centralised exchange perpetual volume in May.
• A major driver of this growth has been HIP-3, Hyperliquid’s builder-deployed perpetual swap framework, which generated more than $62B in volume in May and reached around $3B in open interest.

• Bitmine, the largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury company, has filed to launch a 3M share Series A perpetual preferred stock offering, seeking to raise capital that could be used for additional ETH purchases and expansion of its staking operations.
• The proposed security, which Bitmine plans to list on the NYSE under the ticker BMNP, will carry a 9.5% annual dividend, paid weekly, with unpaid distributions compounding and potentially rising to a maximum yield of 15%.
• The offering follows a structure similar to Strategy’s STRC preferred stock program and comes as Bitmine holds 5.42M ETH while carrying an estimated $9.2B in unrealized losses amid Ethereum’s recent price decline.

• The UK Parliament’s Financial Services Regulation Committee published a report, Stablecoins: waiting for regulation, urging regulators to finalize the country’s stablecoin framework without delay, warning that the UK is falling behind both the U.S. and EU in developing rules for the sector.
• The committee called for a review of proposed stablecoin holding limits, restrictions on commercial bank-issued stablecoins and reserve requirements, while also urging authorities to assess whether additional legislation is needed to address illicit activity involving unhosted and unregulated wallets.

• US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Treasury Department is continuing work on the Trump administration’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, describing the process as moving forward at “all deliberate speed” as officials work through what he called a complex implementation process.
• Speaking during a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Bessent said the administration is focused on ensuring the reserve is built using “best practices” and in a way that will be “durable for the future,” following President Trump’s executive order establishing the reserve earlier this year.
• Bessent also urged lawmakers to pass the CLARITY Act this summer, arguing that a federal market structure framework is necessary to bring digital asset activity onshore and support the U.S. as a global center for crypto innovation.

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