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Bitcoin Taps $60K As Investors Grapple With Rate Hike, Record ETF Outflows

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Bitcoin Taps $60K As Investors Grapple With Rate Hike, Record ETF Outflows

Key takeaways:

  • Persistent spot Bitcoin ETF outflows and US dollar strength reduce the odds of a quick bounce to $65,000.
  • Strong AI sector earnings momentum and higher fixed-income returns pull capital from Bitcoin and gold.

Bitcoin (BTC) reacted positively to US Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s remarks on stubborn inflation. Despite the gains on Wednesday, traders fear that incentives for fixed-income investments and strong earnings momentum in tech stocks will continue to pressure non-yield-bearing assets like cryptocurrencies.

US five-year Treasury yield (left) vs. Bitcoin/USD. Source: TradingView

The US five-year Treasury yield jumped to 4.22%, meaning traders demanded higher returns to hold government bonds. Even as inflation eventually eases and WTI crude oil prices fell to a 4-month low, investors anticipate monetary expansion. Regardless of how the Fed manages interest rates and its balance sheet, the US Treasury dictates debt issuance trends.

Implied odds of FED interest rates on Sept. 16. Source: CME FedWatch Tool

US government bond futures implied 64% odds of interest rate hikes by September, up from 23% one month prior. The higher expected return on fixed-income investments came as the US dollar strengthened against other major global fiat currencies, which is especially concerning for alternative hedges such as gold and Bitcoin.

Gold/USD (left) vs. US dollar strength (DXY). Source: TradingView

Despite the gains on Wednesday, gold prices are down 12% in two months, while the US dollar strength (DXY) nears its highest mark in one year. This vote of confidence in the US economy partly stems from AI sector strength, evident in the 25% gains in the Nasdaq 100 index. However, some specific tech sub-sectors have recently signaled weakness, which could act as a catalyst for Bitcoin and gold.

Could the AI sector cool off act as a catalyst for Bitcoin?

Micron (MU US) and SanDisk (SNDK US) shares saw intraday losses exceeding 9% on Wednesday after competitors SK Hynix (000660 KR) and Samsung (005930 KR) announced plans to expand capacity. Still, the move can hardly be deemed a trend reversal as the iShares SOX Semiconductor Index ETF (SOXX US) gained 78% in three months.

Continued outflows from US-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have shattered bulls’ hopes, reinforcing a negative price spiral as negative news gets amplified while positive events barely register. 

US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs daily net flows, USD. Source: SoSoValue

Regardless of the rationale behind the sales, Bitcoin’s weakness, 53% below its all-time high, does not inspire confidence in the $60,000 support level.

Strategy (MSTR US) increased its cash position to restore a healthy 17 months of dividend coverage on Monday. However, Strategy’s variable-rate Stretch preferred stock (STRC US) continued to trade far from the $100 target required for additional issuances. The STRC dividend rose to 12% from 11.5%, which was apparently not enough to entice more buyers.

Related: Bitcoin just $5K away from ‘best investment opportunity’ of bear market

Bitcoin might have temporarily benefited from Fed Chair Warsh’s concerns about persistent inflation, but rising expectations for higher interest rates and strong earnings momentum in the AI sector may continue to exert negative pressure on Bitcoin. As a result, a sustainable rally to $65,000 could take longer.

Metaplanet (3350) buys another $170 million of bitcoin expanding treasury to 43,000 BTC

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Metaplanet (3350) buys another $170 million of bitcoin expanding treasury to 43,000 BTC

Metaplanet (3350) announced the purchase of an additional 2,823 BTC ($170.7 million), bringing its total treasury to 43,000 BTC ($2.6 billion).

The acquisition cements the Tokyo listed firm as the third largest publicly traded company holding bitcoin, trailing only Strategy MSTR) and Twenty One Capital (XXI), according to data tracked by Bitcoin Treasuries.

Metaplanet closed 3.5% higher at 207 yen ($1.28) on Thursday following the announcement.

Alongside the bitcoin purchase, the company released its second quarter FY2026 results for its Bitcoin Income Generation business. The division generated approximately 1.75 billion yen ($10.85 million) in operating revenue during the quarter, taking first half revenue to approximately 4.72 billion yen.

Metaplanet uses bitcoin options to generate recurring income while expanding the company’s bitcoin holdings. On a trailing 12-month basis, revenue reached approximately 11.4 billion yen.

The latest results reinforce Metaplanet’s dual strategy of aggressively accumulating bitcoin while generating recurring cash flow from its Bitcoin Income Generation business.

XRP edges higher as whale activity rises while retail traders stay cautious

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XRP edges higher as whale activity rises while retail traders stay cautious

New wallet creation hit a three-month high and large-holder activity strengthened, but XRP still needs to reclaim $1.10 before the recovery looks convincing.

Avalanche Treasury Corp Stock Crashes 93%, Warns SEC It May Not Survive the Year

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Avalanche Treasury Corp Stock Crashes 93%, Warns SEC It May Not Survive the Year

Avalanche Treasury Corp told the SEC its ability to continue as a going concern is in doubt after its Nasdaq-listed stock lost 93% of its value in a month, with its AVAX position now worth less than half of what it paid.

Avalanche Treasury Corp, the largest publicly traded company holding AVAX as a corporate treasury asset, told regulators its ability to continue as a going concern is in doubt after its stock collapsed 93% over the past month.

The Nasdaq-listed company, ticker AVAT, disclosed the warning in a 10-Q filing with the SEC, stating that “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is not alleviated.” Shares traded above $10 at the start of June, closed at $1.85 on June 11 following its Nasdaq debut, and fell into penny-stock territory below $0.73 by June 29, wiping out 93% of their value in a month.

AVAT Price. Source: Yahoo

AVAX Bet Underwater

AVAT built its position by merging with blank-check company Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp in a deal that closed with its Nasdaq listing on June 11, part of a plan announced last October to build what the company called a $1 billion pile of AVAX tokens. The company paid roughly $265 million to acquire its AVAX, but the position was worth about $123 million by the end of March, more than half underwater. AVAX has lost 47% of its value year to date and traded near $6.72 on Wednesday, per CoinGecko.

The operating subsidiary lost more than $26 million in the first quarter, almost entirely a fair-value writedown on its AVAX holdings. AVAT has pledged roughly 7.8 million of its 13.8 million AVAX as collateral on a loan, leaving a smaller unencumbered buffer against further price declines. Its market capitalization has fallen to less than $30 million, according to Yahoo Finance.

Treasury Model Under Strain

AVAT’s collapse adds to a string of digital-asset treasury companies that have cratered since a wave of similar vehicles launched in 2025. AgriFORCE Growing Systems rebranded as AVAX One last September with plans to raise $550 million to buy more than $700 million of AVAX; its market value has since fallen to about $43 million, down 68% year to date.

The Defiant reported in June that even Strategy, the largest and longest-running Bitcoin treasury company, saw its enterprise mNAV drop below 1 for the first time, and covered StablecoinX’s Nasdaq debut as the first public ENA treasury vehicle, part of the same corporate-treasury trend now facing pressure across multiple tokens.

Avalanche Foundation and Ava Labs, the core organization behind the Avalanche network, have made no public statement on AVAT’s going-concern disclosure or its stock decline as of publication.

Bitcoin June Close Below 200 Week MA Above Realized Price

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Bitcoin June Close Below 200 Week MA Above Realized Price

Bitcoin could face further downside pressure after ending June below its 200-week moving average but above its realized price, a combination that crypto analyst PlanB says suggests the market has yet to reach a bear market bottom.

Bitcoin fell 20.5% in June to close the month at $58,526 — its worst monthly performance since June 2022 — below its 200-week moving average of $62,000 but above its realized price of $52,000.

“ALL previous bear market bottoms were below realized price,” said PlanB, the creator of the stock-to-flow pricing model, on Wednesday, adding in a separate post that Bitcoin could drop to $52,000.

The price move would mean Bitcoin falling about 60% from its all-time high of $126,000 in October. The dip could be even deeper, as previous bear markets have seen Bitcoin fall even further, such as 83% in 2018 and 76% in 2022.

BTC is undervalued but can still go lower

“Right now, price is much lower than value and indeed might go lower from here (below realized),” PlanB said. “So, Bitcoin is undervalued but can still go lower.”

BTC is trading between the 200-week moving average and the realized price. Source: PlanB 

Bitcoin’s realized price is the aggregate cost basis of all coins in circulation, calculated by valuing each unspent transaction output (UTXO) at the price when it last moved on-chain. It represents the average price at which holders acquired their coins, serving as a key onchain metric for support levels during bear markets.

Related: Bitcoin bounces off 21-month low, but leverage data signals caution: Was $57K the bottom?

Andri Fauzan Adziima, research lead at Bitrue Research Institute, told Cointelegraph that the June close above realized price but below the 200-week moving average “signals the bear bottom is still ahead per prior cycles.”

“I’m eyeing late-2026 capitulation there before the next leg up, though shallower this cycle due to institutions,” he said.

Lacie Zhang, research analyst at Bitget Wallet, told Cointelegraph that the current consolidation near $60,000 is “approaching a potential bottom zone, with strong historical and technical support likely forming around the $55,000 level if further downside occurs.”

Midterm year market bottom

ITC Crypto founder Benjamin Cowen also speculated there could be a cycle bottom for Bitcoin this year, given it is a US midterm election year. This has previously coincided with bear market bottoms in 2018 and 2022.  

“The second half of midterm years usually marks the accumulation zone/market cycle bottom,” he said.

The US midterms are scheduled for Nov. 3, when all House of Representatives seats and about a third of Senate seats are up for election.

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

FBI Director Kash Patel caught sleeping on required disclosure of six-figure MSTR investment

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FBI Director Kash Patel caught sleeping on required disclosure of six-figure MSTR investment

FBI Director Kash Patel failed to timely disclose a six-figure purchase of stock in Strategy (MSTR), the world’s largest publicly-listed bitcoin holder, according to a report by nonpartisan news outlet NOTUS.

Patel supposedly purchased between $100,001 and $250,000 worth of MSTR on Nov. 21, but did not report the trade to regulators until May 26.

The reason for the delay? miscommunication. Patel informed the Office of Government Ethics that he “inadvertently omitted” the transaction due to an unspecified “miscommunication.”

According to the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, high-ranking executive branch officials need to publicly disclose individual stock trades over $1,000 within 45 days from the transaction.

The trade has drawn intense scrutiny from government watchdogs due to Strategy’s BTC accumulation business and its previous business with federal agencies.

The company, which according to NOTUS has done millions of dollars in business over the years with the Justice Department, calls itself as a “Bitcoin Treasury Company,” and aggressively accumulates BTC as its primary reserve asset. Since 2020, the company has built a coin stash of 847,363 BTC, worth over $50 billion as of this writing.

Why The Open-Source Fight Looks Like Crypto Back In 2014

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Why The Open-Source Fight Looks Like Crypto Back In 2014

A new installment of Chain of Thought, the Brownstone Research newsletter written by Ben Lilly, argues that the battle over open-source artificial intelligence is following the same path Bitcoin walked a decade ago, and that investors who recognize the pattern stand to profit.

The note opens with testimony that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei gave to Congress in July 2023. Amodei acknowledged that open source is “a good thing” in most scientific fields and that the risks of open models released so far were “relatively limited,” but he warned that the scaling of open-source models was heading “down a very dangerous path.” 

Lilly reads the subtext plainly: if open models are dangerous, then the closed models sold by companies like Anthropic are the safe choice — and the policy that follows is to restrict the open and elevate the closed.

Bitcoin’s early skeptics mirror what AI is facing

That framing is one digital-asset investors know well. 

He revisits Bitcoin’s early skeptics, from Rep. Jared Polis buying the first Bitcoin on Capitol Hill in 2014 to Sen. Joe Manchin’s call to ban a “dangerous currency,” through the 2023 accusations that regulators tried to cut crypto off from the banking system in what critics dubbed “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” 

The industry survived, he notes, and Washington is now moving toward clearer rules through the passed GENIUS Act and the pending CLARITY Act.

Decentralized AI, which Lilly calls “DeAI,” is having that same fight now. He points to recent developments as evidence the walls are going up: a U.S. export ban on Anthropic’s latest release, which he says will push the company toward permissioned access that verifies a user’s identity before granting a model, and OpenAI’s decision to restrict its GPT-5.6 rollout to trusted partners. 

He expects identity requirements to spread. “It’s for your protection, you see,” he writes. “It always is.”

The note leans on a national-security anecdote to explain the fear driving these moves. Lilly cites NSA chief Joshua Rudd, by way of Sen. Mark Warner, describing how Anthropic’s “Mythos” model broke into “almost all of our classified system, not in weeks, but in hours.”

Yet open source is closing the gap, according to the piece. Lilly says the recent GLM-5.2 scored on par with Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 from February, leaving open models roughly three to four months behind the frontier, and predicts an open rival to Mythos and GPT-5.6 by fall. 

He argues the bigger unlock is decentralized training on peer-to-peer networks that mirror Bitcoin and Ethereum — swapping compute-for-network-security for compute-for-model-training. Distributed training, he notes, has grown from sub-1-billion parameters to 100 billion in two years.

He names three early projects — Dark Bloom, which enables low-cost private inference on idle Macs; c0mpute, a decentralized inference network; and Pluralis, which trains AI across distributed consumer GPUs — and expects more to launch tokens and reward users for contributing compute.

The note ends with the notion that governments will try to ban open models and they will fail. For him, investing in the space “will be like buying Bitcoin in 2014, back when it was still ‘dangerous.’”

A new nonprofit launches with a focus on Wall Street and institutional adoption

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A new nonprofit launches with a focus on Wall Street and institutional adoption

A new independent non-profit, Ethereum Institutional, has launched with the goal of accelerating institutional adoption of Ethereum, its layer-2 networks and the broader ecosystem.

The organization is led by David Walsh, Marius Smith and Matthew Dawson. Walsh previously led the Ethereum Foundation’s enterprise efforts, while the organization said its leadership brings experience spanning institutional engagement, capital markets and Ethereum ecosystem development. It said its mission is to provide institutions with a neutral, independent point of contact as they evaluate Ethereum for tokenization, stablecoins and other onchain financial infrastructure.

In announcing the initiative on X, Ethereum Institutional said institutions need “a credible, independent front door” to the Ethereum ecosystem. While Ethereum’s neutrality is one of its defining strengths, the group argued, that neutrality has often left enterprises without a clear organization to engage as they make long-term infrastructure decisions.

The launch comes as the Ethereum Foundation continues to narrow its role to stewarding the core protocol, with ecosystem participants increasingly spinning up independent organizations focused on specific areas such as business development, institutional outreach and developer support. The shift follows broader changes at the foundation, including leadership restructuring and longstanding community calls for greater transparency.

Standard Chartered starts Morpho coverage with $60 price target by 2030

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Standard Chartered starts Morpho coverage with $60 price target by 2030

Investment bank Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho, calling the lending protocol a dual-play on decentralized finance (DeFi) that combines a lending market with infrastructure for onchain banks and asset managers.

The bank has a $60 price target for MORPHO by the end of 2030, implying roughly 33x upside from its current price. This would see the token outperform both bitcoin BTC$60,299.90 and ether (ETH) over the same period.

MORPHO was more than 13% higher over 24 hours, trading around $2.13 at publication time.

“Given its status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its comfortable financial position (it just raised $175 million in VC funding), we think Morpho can scale to meet the expanding base of assets deployed in DeFi,” wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, in the Wednesday report.

Decentralized finance has rebounded sharply over the past year as institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and onchain lending accelerated. Lending protocols have benefited from rising stablecoin adoption and renewed demand for crypto credit, while infrastructure providers that enable asset managers and financial institutions to deploy capital onchain have emerged as one of the sector’s fastest-growing segments.

Crypto ATM Bans, Restrictions Now in Effect in Tennessee and Georgia

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Crypto ATM Bans, Restrictions Now in Effect in Tennessee and Georgia

Cryptocurrency ATMs are fast disappearing from the American landscape as kiosk operators in two US states face bans and restrictions as new laws go into effect.

Crypto ATM laws passed by Tennessee and Georgia went into effect on Wednesday, imposing a complete ban in the former and requiring transaction limits and reporting in the latter. The measures by the two states followed bans in Indiana, which went into effect in March, and Minnesota, set to enforce an ATM ban on Aug. 1.

The Tennessee law, signed by Governor Bill Lee in April, bans the use and installation of cryptocurrency ATMs and kiosks, while the Georgia law requires that ATM operators cap money sent for new and existing users, issue warnings to customers and in some cases refund those who may have been the victims of fraud.

There were 185 crypto ATMs and kiosks operating in Tennessee before the statewide ban took effect on July 1. Source: CoinATMRadar

Many US state governments and municipalities have individually begun cracking down on crypto ATM operators in response to incidents of residents, particularly senior citizens, being conned into sending funds to scammers. Delaware and New Jersey lawmakers have proposed similar measures completely banning the machines.

Related: Massachusetts city to weigh crypto ATM ban, citing financial risks

The restrictions may have already contributed to at least one ATM operator going under. In May, Bitcoin Depot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had disclosed just days before that it had “substantial doubts” about its future amid a challenging regulatory environment and lawsuits.

“Bitcoin Depot’s bankruptcy is likely a preview of what the broader crypto ATM industry will face in the US over the next several years,” Roshan Dharia, CEO of Echo Base and a restructuring adviser, told Cointelegraph following the Chapter 11 filing. “The traditional model depended on high transaction spreads and limited regulatory scrutiny to offset unusually high compliance, cash logistics, fraud remediation, and retail revenue sharing costs. That equation is breaking down as states increasingly impose consumer protection standards that compress fees, expand operator liability for scam related activity, and raise expectations around transaction monitoring and reimbursement.”

Canada weighs countrywide ATM ban

Although not in effect yet, federal policymakers in Canada proposed a total ban on crypto ATMs across the country. The proposed policy, which would still allow Canadians to buy digital assets from brick-and-mortar money services businesses, was in response to what officials called the ATMs being the “primary method for scammers to defraud victims and for criminals to place their cash proceeds of crime.”

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

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