Analysts track this using a metric called spent transaction outputs (STXO), which, in simple terms, tracks the movement of BTC on the blockchain. An OG moving coins after holding them for half a decade is almost always a sign of impending liquidation or profit-taking.
During the peak of the bullish cycle, single-day sell-offs sometimes exceeded 142,000 BTC, sending shockwaves through the market.
But that’s not the case anymore.
The timing of this slowdown in OG selling is not a coincidence, according to analysts at CryptoQuant. Currently, bitcoin is trading around $63,000, which, as it turns out, could be the “break-even” point for the most expensive coins this group could have possibly purchased five years ago, analysts explained on X.
By looking to hold at these levels, the OGs are effectively removing a massive source of selling pressure that capped BTC’s gains above $100,000 last year.
In other words, sell-side pressures are weakening just as some contrary indicators warn of a bottom. Note that outflows from spot ETFs have also slowed over the past two weeks in a positive sign for the cryptocurrency.
As of this writing, bitcoin changed hands near $62,750, largely unchanged on a 24-hour basis.
The US House has passed a major housing bill that includes a ban on central bank digital currencies until 2030, in what is set to be a major win for Republicans who have long pushed for such a measure.
The House voted 358-32 on Tuesday to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a day after the Senate voted 85-5 to pass the bill, which largely aims to tackle housing affordability. The bill now heads to US President Donald Trump, who has signaled support for the measure and is expected to sign it into law on Wednesday.
“Today, Congress delivered a major win for families working toward the American Dream,” said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott. “I look forward to President Trump signing it into law.”
CBDCs are a representation of fiat currency issued by a central bank on a ledger. The signing of the bill will be a win for Republicans who have tried to pass a CBDC ban for years, and for crypto advocates who see CBDCs as an attempt to repurpose technology made for decentralized assets into a centrally controlled asset.
The housing bill includes language that the Federal Reserve may not, directly or indirectly, “issue or create a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar to a central bank digital currency,” a clause that expires on Dec. 31, 2030.
Source: US Senate Banking Committee GOP
The bill’s quick passage comes after House and Senate leaders reached a deal to move forward with the housing bill last week, after previously disagreeing over multiple aspects of the legislation.
The bill has included the CBDC ban since the Senate passed a version of it in March. It also features a carve-out for crypto stablecoins, allowing “dollar-denominated currency that is open, permissionless and private.”
The CBDC ban revived language from Republican Representative Tom Emmer’s Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act. That bill was introduced in June 2025 and passed the House a month later, but it never saw movement in the Senate.
Related: Crypto lobby urges Congress to pass staking and mining tax bill as is
With the bill off lawmakers’ agenda, Congress can now focus on passing other legislation before the August recess and the November midterm elections.
One bill that has garnered particular interest is the Senate’s crypto market structure bill, dubbed the CLARITY Act, which many lawmakers have been pushing to advance.
Despite months of talks between lawmakers and crypto and banking lobbyists, the CLARITY Act is still seeing pushback, and the odds of it being passed this year have slipped.
Earlier this month, Galaxy Digital lowered its estimate of the Senate passing the bill before the end of the year, giving it a 60% chance as the congressional calendar tightens.
Magazine: How crypto laws changed in 2025 — and how they’ll change in 2026
Micron, Marvell and On Semiconductor, each more than doubled in 2026, led the drop. The selloff pulled the S&P 500 down 1.4% and the Nasdaq 100 down 3.3%. An attempted rebound in Asian chip stocks failed to hold on Wednesday, with Taiwan Semiconductor down more than 3%.
Oil kept falling as the other half of the macro picture. Brent crude slipped about 1% toward $76 a barrel as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz became more visible following the US-Iran interim peace deal. A gauge of the dollar climbed to a seven-month high as investors moved toward safer assets.
The crypto-specific signal sits in the fund flows, said Mike McCluskey, co-founder of tx, in an email to CoinDesk. He called bitcoin’s stabilization in the low-to-mid $60,000s a measured response to the Federal Reserve’s hawkish turn, given how hard such shifts usually hit digital assets.
US spot bitcoin ETFs have seen a record 30-day net outflow of more than $6 billion, which McCluskey described as sustained institutional de-risking by the same buyers that drove this cycle. Until those flows clearly reverse, he said, relief rallies are likely to hit a hard ceiling.
McCluskey also flagged Friday’s options expiry on Deribit, with roughly $10.6 billion in notional value set to expire. An option is a contract giving the right to buy or sell at a set price, and notional value is the total value of the assets those contracts cover.
Bitcoin and ether are grinding toward the lower end of their recent ranges, major market making firm Wintermute’s OTC trading desk said in a Wednesday note shared with CoinDesk, with both assets caught between last week’s hawkish Fed and the stop-start Iran headlines.
Options markets price a relatively tight move for the next 24 hours. Wintermute’s one-day straddle, a measure of expected swing derived from options pricing, put bitcoin in a $61,242 to $63,563 range and ether between $1,606 and $1,694, implying moves of about 1.9% and 2.7% respectively.
The backdrop is deteriorating. Token correlations are rising, meaning assets are moving together rather than on their own fundamentals, while liquidity is thinning into the summer months with no fresh institutional bid visible in ETF flows.
Wintermute flagged $59,000 as the level to watch, calling it the bear market low and the key support if current pressure continues.
Three catalysts shape the rest of the week: the U.S.-Iran peace deal and whether it holds, Thursday’s PCE inflation print, the Fed’s preferred measure of price growth, and the quarterly options expiry at month-end, which can amplify moves as traders roll or close large positions.
Europe’s markets regulator has told unauthorized crypto-asset service providers to shut down EU operations without delay. The European Securities and Markets Authority issued the directive as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation transitional period expires on 1 July 2026.
MiCA is the EU’s landmark crypto regulatory framework. It requires any firm offering crypto services to EU clients to hold a formal authorization. A transitional period allowed existing providers to continue operating under national regimes while they sought approval. That window closes on July 1.
Some firms secured authorization ahead of the deadline. Others did not. ESMA’s statement targets the second group.
According to the ESMA release, unauthorized firms face a clear set of obligations. They must stop taking on new EU clients. Marketing and solicitation to EU residents must cease. New accounts cannot be opened.
Existing services must narrow in scope. Firms can only continue operating to the extent necessary to help clients sell assets, transfer holdings, close positions, or exit the platform.
Custody of client assets is permitted only for as long as it takes to complete an exit in good order. Firms must also communicate with clients. ESMA expects communication to be clear, prompt, and repeated.
Clients need to know the wind-down timeline, what protections are in place, and what will happen to residual positions if no action is taken. A deadline for automatic position closure must be stated.
AML crypto rules still apply
ESMA emphasized that compliance obligations do not pause during a wind-down. Firms must maintain anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing controls throughout the exit process. This includes customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, suspicious transaction reporting, and record-keeping.
Where a client transfers to a MiCA-authorized provider, the receiving firm must conduct full onboarding checks. Authorization does not carry over from an old provider.
ESMA extended the warning to firms based outside the European Union. Non-EU CASPs cannot provide MiCA-covered services to EU clients, including in business-to-business arrangements.
The regulator also noted that MiCA bars firms from outsourcing custody services to entities that lack CASP authorization under the regulation.
ESMA issued a direct warning to retail users. Clients of unauthorized providers do not benefit from MiCA’s investor protection rules. There is no guarantee of asset safeguarding under the framework if the provider is not licensed.
EU clients were advised to check whether their provider holds authorization by consulting the ESMA Register, a public database of licensed CASPs.
The July 1 deadline marks the end of a years-long transition to a unified EU crypto rulebook.
“Strengthening the resilience of payments in Europe has become a geopolitical necessity,” Markus Ferber, a leading member of the ECON committee said on Tuesday.
“In a world marked by geopolitical tensions, we can no longer accept that digital payments are largely dependent on the goodwill of a few foreign providers,” he added, echoing concerns expressed across the EU.
The new rules voted by the ECON Committee cleared the way for the ECB to introduce both online and offline versions of the currency by 2029. Crucially, the offline version will allow users to swap digital euros directly from phone to phone without an internet connection, guaranteeing cash-like privacy that prevents the ECB from seeing what citizens are buying.
The EU’s central bank digital euro approval comes just hours after U.S. Senate voted to place a four-year ban on a CBDC. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives. If they follow suit it then goes to President Donald Trump for his signature.
Commercial banks successfully lobbied for strict holding limits on how much a citizen can keep in a digital wallet to avoid a mass exodus of cash from traditional accounts during a crisis.
The ECB will now undertake a 12-month pilot phase using a beta version to test the infrastructure in real-world scenarios with select merchants and payment service providers.
In the same state, Fairshake backed incumbent Representative April McClain Delaney for $516,000, while also contributing ad spending in other states’ Tuesday primaries to Republican incumbent Representative Blake Moore in Utah and $1.3 million for one of the industry’s most reliable allies in the House, Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat. All of them also won their races or were winning, with McClain Delaney in an early lead with votes still being counted.
The most recent Federal Election Commission filings showed Fairshake with about $126 million still on-hand at the end of last month. But it’s spending heavily on the way to the November general elections in which the two-year destiny of the U.S. Congress will be decided.
If Boafo contributes to the rise of a new Democratic majority in the House, the crypto industry will have a campaign-finance bond with him and other Democrats the PAC has supported. A Democratic majority is set at 79% odds in betting on prediction market platform Kalshi, and if the party earns that status, it’ll have chairmanships of all the committees, complete with control of the chamber’s agenda and subpoena power.
Fairshake’s approach is to flood pro-crypto candidates from both parties with large-scale independent advertising that can’t legally be coordinated with the campaigns. The ads don’t typically mention crypto as a political issues but are instead just calculated to use whatever political message would be most helpful for the candidates.
Amid waning poll numbers and pressure from inside the Labour Party, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has stepped down.
During Starmer’s tenure, the government introduced a moratorium on cryptocurrency donations to political campaigns, citing concerns that crypto could become a vector for foreign influence in UK elections. Beyond the ban, the UK has charted a cautious path on crypto regulation under the Labour government.
Starmer’s departure from Number 10 has started discussions about his successor. A frontrunner has emerged in Andy Burnham, a member of parliament for Makerfield and former Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Burnham has expressed optimism about the blockchain industry’s ability to support economic development. But it remains to be seen whether that enthusiasm can translate into real policy moves.
Burnham wanted Manchester to be a “Web 3 powerhouse”
A graduate of Cambridge, Burnham served as a Cabinet minister under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, both as Health Secretary and Culture Secretary. From 2010 to 2015, he served as Shadow Education Secretary and Shadow Health Secretary under Ed Miliband before unsuccessfully contesting the Labor leadership bid in 2015.
From 2015-2016, he was Shadow Home Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn before leaving Westminster to become Mayor of Manchester in 2017.
As mayor, Burnham has consistently framed digital technology as an economic development tool and a way of driving growth and jobs in the city. This framing was evident at a Stand With Crypto and Manchester Blockchain Alliance event, where he said, “I’m bought in.”
He further noted his commitment to “make [Manchester] the Web3 powerhouse that we want it to be.”
Whether this will translate into a coherent national policy is another matter. As mayor, Burnham championed a model dubbed “Manchesterism,” which prioritized devolution, regional economic control and public-private partnerships.
It’s a bottom-up approach that, some observers in the crypto industry say, needs to be amplified if it’s to bring national-level change to the industry.
Nick Jones, founder and CEO of UK digital assets services platform Zumo, told Cointelegraph, “Burnham’s rhetoric on crypto has to date been heavily influenced by his role as Mayor of Greater Manchester. For example, he has previously drawn parallels between digital innovation and historical developments, pointing out that Manchester was the home of the Industrial Revolution and has the potential to become the home of the Web3 revolution.”
“But such soundbites were to be expected in the context of his role. If he becomes Prime Minister, he will be well aware of the need to amplify that ambition and ensure the UK as a whole sits at the heart of the world’s future financial system,” he said.
Related: UK central bank is warming up to stablecoins, but says industry input is lacking
Benoit Marzouk, the CEO of GBP stablecoin tGBP, told Cointelegraph that Burnham’s Manchester experience “is not a handicap.” Rather, his experience outside Westminster, “could help implement and accelerate the right policies for the digital asset industry across the UK.”
Burnham has not yet published a detailed digital assets policy. His public comments about crypto reflect broader enthusiasm rather than specific regulatory commitments. He has not yet addressed the Financial Conduct Authority’s crypto framework, stablecoin law, or the crypto political donation ban on public record.
The donation ban, politics, and what Burnham could actually do
In March, Stamer’s government banned crypto donations to political campaigns over concerns of foreign influence in British elections.
The ban followed an independent review by Philip Rycroft, a former civil servant turned consultant, who found that the pseudonymous nature of crypto assets created unacceptable risks to political financing transparency.
Reversing a policy introduced on the recommendation of an independent review carries political risk. Labor’s left could scrutinize any move that appears to open the party to crypto money, which Reform UK has used to fund its leading performance in recent local elections.
According to Reuters, crypto donations from billionaires based overseas put Reform well ahead of Labour in the fundraising race. Reform’s leader Nigel Farage is under investigation for an undisclosed 5 million pound ($6.6 million) gift from British Thai-based businessman Christopher Harborne.
Despite obvious ethics concerns, Farage said he should be able to spend the gift however he wishes, be it for campaigning, or on Ferraris and betting on horses.
Amid political concerns over the temporary moratorium, a 180-degree ban reversal from Burnham seems unlikely.
Marzouk expects Burnham to exhibit “pragmatism rather than political announcements.” For tGBP, success in the first year of a Burnham premiership would include a finalized stablecoin framework, pilot programs involving government and GBP stablecoins and continuing work on tokenization.
Tom Rhodes, chief legal officer for UK stablecoin issuer Agant, told Cointelegraph, “We don’t expect the next PM to interfere with any specific policies. The regulators remain independent and cryptoasset regulation is nearly settled.”
Jones said that Burnham is “on record strongly backing the underlying economic potential of our nascent sector.”
“If he does become the next Prime Minister, it’s unlikely his position will change. I believe he would continue to pursue the current growth-focused policy approach.”
The transition period could be bumpy, stalling momentum, according to Jones. “Any potential cabinet reshuffle could displace ministers who are familiar with the evolving regulatory regime at the critical inflection point when regulators and industry alike are preparing for authorization, and that would be a problem.”
Labour is yet to announce an official timetable for replacing Starmer, although the former PM has said that he’d like to see nominations open on July 9, after a NATO summit. According to Sky News, it could be a week later, on July 16, when parliament goes on summer recess.
The winner must receive more than half the votes cast. If no one receives the necessary votes, then ballots are recast based on preference.
ETH price hangs in the balance as a fresh wave of liquidations pressure the altcoin and spillover from Bitcoin’s struggles to hold $62,000 impact investor sentiment.
Bull Bitcoin has obtained a MiCA license in France, ensuring users in European Union member states can continue accessing its Bitcoin exchange and payment services without interruption or any reduction in functionality. Founder Francis Pouliot announced the development on June 23, 2026, via X, marking the end of a nearly three-year, self-financed effort to enter the European market.
“We are particularly excited to have obtained our MICA license without needing to compromise on our cypherpunk approach to self-custody and privacy,” Pouliot stated. “All features of our website and wallet will remain exactly the same as they have been for the first half of 2026, with no additional burden or restrictions imposed on our users. We have proven that it is possible to meet the highest requirements of regulatory compliance without becoming overzealous.”
The company also reported passing the required PASSI and DORA cybersecurity audits without outsourcing its core Bitcoin infrastructure to third-party hosted providers. “That was a huge win,” Pouliot wrote, noting that relying on external services would have been easier and cheaper but would have compromised sovereignty. The entire process was funded internally, with no external investors or lenders solicited.
Bull Bitcoin, founded in 2013 in Montreal by Pouliot, operates as a Bitcoin-only, non-custodial exchange. Users supply their own wallet address before any purchase, with Bitcoin sent directly to the customer’s control rather than held by the company. This model has defined the firm’s cypherpunk orientation since inception, alongside services such as Bitcoin bill payments for rent, utilities, and real estate, plus support for Lightning Network, Liquid, and Payjoin privacy tools.
The license provides a long-term regulatory foothold in Europe following the company’s expansion of its France-based team and eurozone services. Pouliot previously noted the firm’s experience navigating Canadian oversight and its willingness to meet obligations while pushing back against overreach. The new authorization aligns with that stance: core operations and user experience stay intact.
In October 2025, Bull Bitcoin launched its BULL Wallet, a global, open-source, privacy-first mobile app for iOS and Android with deep opt-in integration to the exchange. Features include Payjoin support, Lightning and Liquid compatibility, and no data collection or push notifications. The wallet and exchange integration remain unchanged under the new license.
Pouliot expressed pride in the team’s execution and outlined next steps: “Having secured a long-term foothold in Europe, our ambition is global domination and setting a new standard on how to build the infrastructure Bitcoin deserves.”
The development comes amid tightening EU crypto rules under MiCA, where many providers have faced pressure to exit or alter operations. Bull Bitcoin’s outcome suggests that rigorous compliance is achievable while maintaining direct user custody, in-house infrastructure control, and privacy tooling, though how exactly they resolved the tension between user privacy expectations and MiCA compliance was not explained in the announcement.
