Bosnia-Herzegovina's World Cup success symbolizes national resilience and unity, offering hope and pride to a nation rebuilding its identity.

The post Zlatan Ibrahimovic moved to tears as Bosnia-Herzegovina reaches World Cup knockout stage appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Pulsar 16B's efficiency and open-source nature could drive innovation in AI, offering scalable solutions for enterprises and developers alike.

The post Multiverse Computing launches Pulsar 16B reasoning model powered by Nvidia appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Spain's injury woes could undermine their tactical strengths and depth, posing a significant challenge in the unforgiving knockout stages.

The post Spain faces injury setbacks ahead of World Cup knockout stages appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The integration of tokenized gold into crypto lending could enhance financial flexibility and diversify investment options, impacting market dynamics.

The post Tether expands gold reserve use as Ledn supports tokenized gold XAUT appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Belgium's narrow advancement highlights the increasing impact of FIFA's tiebreaker rules and the volatile nature of fan token markets.

The post World Cup Group G standings shift dramatically as Belgium edges Egypt on goal difference appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Galaxy Research Cuts CLARITY Act Passage Odds to 50-50 as Senate Clock Runs Out

Galaxy Digital’s research arm has cut its estimate of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 50-50, down from 60% just three weeks ago, citing a Senate floor calendar that grows shorter each week and a bill that still lacks a merged text, a scheduled vote, or public commitment from leadership.

The downgrade, published by Galaxy researcher Alex Thorn, is a calendar story more than a substance story. The bill itself — the CLARITY Act, short for the Digital Asset Market Structure and Investor Protection Act — cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 on May 14 and has sat on the Senate Legislative Calendar as item No. 423 ever since. No floor date has been set. No motion to proceed has been scheduled.

The CLARITY Act represents the most significant attempt yet by Congress to build a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets. It draws jurisdictional lines between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, establishes standards for when a digital asset is a commodity versus a security, and includes the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), which provides protections for certain blockchain developers and node operators. 

The bill passed out of the Senate Banking Committee with bipartisan support, a notable threshold in a political environment where crypto legislation has often stalled on party-line divisions.

The House passed a version of market structure legislation in 2024, but Senate action has been the harder lift. Banking and Agriculture committees both have jurisdiction, and staff-level reconciliation of the two committee texts is still underway. No unified legislative text has been made public.

The calendar problem with the CLARITY Act

For a 60-vote bill — one that needs to clear the filibuster — the math is tight. The Senate is scheduled to begin its August recess at the end of July. Between now and then, a merged Banking-Agriculture text still needs to be finalized, a motion to proceed must be filed, floor debate must occur, and an amendment process must run. 

After all that, the House would need to act on whatever the Senate produces.

Thorn wrote that Senate Majority Leader John Thune needs to announce floor time by early July “at the latest” for a July vote to be realistic. 

Without a scheduling announcement on that timeline, the path shifts to September — and September runs into midterm-election dynamics that make scheduling controversial votes difficult.

The competition for floor time has intensified. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lapsed on June 12 after Congress failed to pass a reauthorization, and a Grassley-Cotton-Warner product still needs floor time. 

The FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass annual defense bill, also remains unfinished.

And on June 24, President Trump canceled the scheduled signing of a bipartisan housing bill that passed 358-32 in the House and 85-5 in the Senate, conditioning his signature on Congress first passing the SAVE Act, a proof-of-citizenship elections bill that Thune has said lacks the votes to pass the chamber. That condition injects another leadership-consuming fight into an already packed queue.

The calendar is the headline, but the bill’s substance has not been fully resolved. The ethics question remains the central open issue: a Van Hollen conflict-of-interest amendment failed 11-13 in committee, and Senators Ruben Gallego and Cory Booker continue to make enforceable ethics standards a condition of their support.

Thorn wrote that at least two Republican no votes — Josh Hawley and Rand Paul — are expected, which means Democratic crossover support is not optional. Law enforcement-aligned senators are also pressing for further changes to the developer-protection language inside the BRCA.

Galaxy’s note identified conditions that would push the odds back up: a public agreement on a combined Banking-Agriculture text, credible resolution of the ethics or BRCA disputes in a way that locks in a durable Democratic bloc, and a floor commitment from leadership for July. A scheduling announcement in the next two weeks, Thorn wrote, would push the firm back toward 60% or higher. Continued silence into mid-July would push it lower.

For now, the bill waits at No. 423 on the Senate calendar — real, but unscheduled, in a chamber that keeps finding other things to do.

This post Galaxy Research Cuts CLARITY Act Passage Odds to 50-50 as Senate Clock Runs Out first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Billionaire Investor Jeremy Grantham: Bitcoin Will ‘Dwindle Away With a Whimper’

Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham — co-founder of asset management firm GMO and one of Wall Street’s most prominent bubble-spotters — came at Bitcoin again on Friday, calling the asset a “useless, speculative mechanism” destined for slow decline into irrelevance.

Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Grantham predicted that Bitcoin will “dwindle away, I suspect — not with a bang, but a whimper.” He said he has never owned Bitcoin and believes it will fall to zero, not through a sudden crash but through a gradual erosion of interest over years and decades.

“All Bitcoin does is allow fraudsters to move money around,” he said.

Grantham pointed to Bitcoin’s instability as evidence against its status as a store of value. The coin “halved for no particular reason in a strong economy,” he noted — a critique with fresh teeth given where Bitcoin stands today. 

Gold, he added, has delivered solid gains over the same period.

Perhaps Grantham is right, the selloff has been severe. BTC hit an all-time high near $126,000 in October 2025. Since then, the digital asset has shed more than 50% of its value. As of Friday, BTC traded in the $60,000 range, testing what analysts consider a critical support zone that, if broken, could open a path to the $40,000s.

Bitcoin fell toward $62,000 in mid-June as hawkish signals from the Federal Reserve spooked risk markets. Rising U.S.–Iran geopolitical tensions sent oil prices higher and reignited inflation fears, pushing Fed officials to abandon any talk of rate cuts — with some floating the possibility of rate hikes. U.S. spot BTC ETFs posted four consecutive days of net outflows totaling around $113.8 million.

Bitcoin’s attempt to reclaim higher ground ran straight into its 200-day moving average, which served as hard resistance and triggered a roughly 30% decline from that ceiling. The current drawdown is among the 5th worst in Bitcoin’s history — territory that tests the resolve of long-term holders. Some institutional buyers, however, are treating the dip as an entry point, with Coinbase reporting that major institutions have stepped in to buy the crash.

Another billionaire bets big on bitcoin

On the flip side, Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego has placed 70% of his investment portfolio into BTC — up from just 10% in 2020 — and has even convinced his wife to mortgage their home to buy more. 

The founder of Grupo Salinas traces his skepticism of fiat currency to family dinner table conversations about Nixon ending the gold standard, and views Bitcoin as superior to both cash and gold because it is unseizable and borderless. 

His conviction has survived a $150 million loan scam, regulatory pushback on his plans to make Banco Azteca Mexico’s first Bitcoin-accepting bank, and multiple market cycles. 

He recently pointed to a decade of London property prices as proof of his thesis — a home that cost 4,000 BTC in 2016 now costs fewer than 30 — and urges ordinary investors to convert their home equity into BTC exposure, calling it “an asymmetrical bet to the upside.” 

This post Billionaire Investor Jeremy Grantham: Bitcoin Will ‘Dwindle Away With a Whimper’ first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Michael Saylor Responds to Scrutiny as Strategy Shares and STRC Hit 52-Week Lows

Michael Saylor responded to the deepening selloff in Strategy’s stock and preferred shares Friday with a statement on X.

“Volatility tests every capital structure,” Saylor wrote. “Strategy remains focused on Bitcoin, disciplined capital allocation, credit quality, and long-term value creation. We appreciate our investors and will continue to execute with transparency and resolve. $MSTR”.

The tweet landed as MSTR shares and STRC, Strategy’s variable-rate perpetual preferred, both hit 52-week lows. MSTR has shed more than 80% from its all-time peak. STRC, which carries a par value of $100, traded near $74 — a 26% discount. When preferred shares trade below par, the mechanism that funds bitcoin purchases through preferred issuance breaks down: the company cannot raise capital on favorable terms on instruments trading at a discount.

Bitcoin broke to $58,000 Wednesday for the first time since October 2024, pushing Strategy’s paper losses above $14 billion. The company holds 847,363 bitcoin at an average purchase price of $75,680 per coin — a gap of more than $17,000 per coin at current prices.

MSTR shares, which had shed around 25% over five trading days going into Friday, extended that decline somewhat in pre-market trading as bitcoin’s slide appeared to stagnate. The stock trades at an mNAV below 1.0, meaning the market values Strategy’s shares at a discount to the bitcoin on its balance sheet.

That matters because the company’s model depends on a premium: Strategy issues stock or preferred instruments above NAV, deploys proceeds into bitcoin, and lifts NAV per share in the process. With the premium gone, both capital taps are constrained at the same time.

Strategy’s cash strain deepens further

The pressure on the capital structure extends past bitcoin’s price. Annual dividend obligations on Strategy’s preferred instruments — STRC, STRK, STRF, STRD, and STRE — have risen from $300 million at the start of 2026 to $1.2 billion, a fourfold increase in six months. Cash reserves have fallen 38% this year. Dividend coverage, once above seven years, has compressed to about 14 months.

A Bloomberg report Thursday described investor scrutiny of Saylor’s funding model as the most intense the company has faced. CryptoQuant issued a note this week calling on Strategy to halt bitcoin purchases and rebuild cash to $2.8 billion before resuming accumulation.

Strategy made its first bitcoin sale in four years in early June, offloading 32 BTC at an average of $77,135 per coin. Saylor framed the move as proof the company could cover dividend obligations through asset liquidation. The market’s reaction suggests that framing did not hold.

Last week, Strategy bought 520 bitcoin — a fraction of its prior pace — and put $300 million of a $335.5 million equity raise into cash rather than bitcoin. Saylor has not elaborated on the tweet beyond the statement posted to X.

This post Michael Saylor Responds to Scrutiny as Strategy Shares and STRC Hit 52-Week Lows first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

‘I See Volatility as Opportunity’: Bitcoin Tests Critical Support as Key Level Hangs in the Balance

Bitcoin has shed more than 50% of its value since hitting an all-time high near $126,000, and the market is now locked in a tense standoff at a support level that technical analysts say could determine the digital asset’s next major move.

The cryptocurrency has been testing the $58,000–$60,000 range for the third time in recent months, a zone that chart watchers consider critical. Below that threshold, the next meaningful support sits in the low $40,000s, a drop that would push Bitcoin into drawdown territory comparable to its most brutal prior cycles.

The sell-off has been swift and precise. Bitcoin’s failed attempt to break higher ran straight into its 200-day moving average, a level that served as near-perfect resistance and triggered a roughly 30% decline from that ceiling. The pattern has left the asset in a clear downtrend, though some technical indicators are beginning to flash warning signs for bears.

“We’re looking for stabilization,” said Katie Stockton, founder and managing partner of Fairlead Strategies on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “Ideally it does happen in this range because it is a key Fibonacci retracement level, below which a full retracement often happens.”

Stockton noted that Bitcoin has been in a long-term oversold condition for a duration that, based on historical patterns, tends to precede a shift in momentum. That does not mean a bottom is confirmed, she said she would want to see two to three weeks of price stabilization before feeling conviction that support is holding.

The $60,000 level carries weight beyond Fibonacci math. It represents a psychological marker and has been a contested battleground across multiple test cycles. A clean break below it would erase a layer of confidence among retail and institutional holders alike.

80% drawdowns in bitcoin’s price

Some Bitcoin bulls have argued this cycle is structurally different from previous crashes. The presence of spot Bitcoin ETFs, growing institutional adoption, and broader mainstream acceptance, they say, may cap the depth of any drawdown compared to the 80%-plus collapses seen in earlier bear markets. Stockton is not convinced the argument holds.

“I think we can still see those 75 to 80% drawdowns,” she said, “but as a technician, I almost see the volatility as opportunity.”

That framing cuts to a tension at the heart of Bitcoin trading: the gap between what investors say they want and what they do when prices fall. At $125,000, many buyers felt priced out. At $60,000, the same buyers hesitate to pull the trigger. 

Market psychology, Stockton noted, runs counter to rational accumulation.

On the question of four-year halving cycles — a framework many Bitcoin traders treat as gospel — Stockton said the sample size is too small to place confidence in the pattern. She described herself as a Bitcoin bull from a “very, very long-term perspective,” while maintaining that short-term risk management through trend-following tools remains the more reliable approach.

For now, Bitcoin sits at a crossroads. The coming weeks will test whether institutional infrastructure and long-term demand are enough to hold a line that, if broken, leaves a long way down to the next floor.

This post ‘I See Volatility as Opportunity’: Bitcoin Tests Critical Support as Key Level Hangs in the Balance first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Stock (MSTR) Nearly Craters Another 10% as Securities Lawsuit Lands

Strategy Inc. (MSTR) fell more than 9% at times on Thursday to its lowest level since March 2024, extending a five-day collapse of nearly 30% as Bitcoin broke below $60,000 and a securities investigation targeting the company became public.

Shares of the Michael Saylor-led Bitcoin treasury company hit $85 by midday Thursday, down from above $117 at the start of the week. The stock has now shed roughly 36% over the past month — nearly double the 18.5% decline in Bitcoin over the same period.

On top of this, Rosen Law Firm posted a press release saying it is investigating potential securities fraud claims against Strategy, alleging the company “may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public.” The probe covers all five of Strategy’s publicly traded securities: MSTR, STRF, STRC, STRK, and STRD. 

The legal pressure compounds a financial squeeze that analysts say stems from Strategy’s own capital structure. 

The company holds 847,363 Bitcoin — the largest corporate stockpile in the world — purchased at an average price that now leaves the entire 2024, 2025, and 2026 acquisition tranche underwater. Unrealized losses on the Bitcoin portfolio stand at approximately $10.6 billion.

Strategy’s preferred stock breaks down

The deeper concern for investors is Strategy’s STRC preferred stock, which has crashed to an all-time low and now trades around $76 — roughly 24% below its $100 par value. The structure matters because Strategy has relied on selling preferred stock to fund ongoing Bitcoin purchases. 

When preferred shares trade below par, that capital-raise mechanism stalls.

As Strategy issued more STRC over the past six months, annual dividend obligations ballooned from $300 million at the start of 2026 to $1.2 billion — a fourfold increase. Cash reserves, meanwhile, fell 38% over the same period. 

CryptoQuant, the on-chain analytics firm, published a note June 23 urging Strategy to stop buying Bitcoin and rebuild its cash position to roughly $2.8 billion before resuming accumulation. The firm said dividend coverage has collapsed from more than seven years to approximately 14 months.

Strategy appears to have gotten the message before the report landed. In the week of June 22, the company bought just 520 Bitcoin for roughly $35 million — a fraction of its prior pace — and routed $300 million of a $335.5 million common stock raise into its cash reserve, lifting it to $1.4 billion.

Saylor has not commented publicly on the investigation or CryptoQuant’s warning.

This post Strategy Stock (MSTR) Nearly Craters Another 10% as Securities Lawsuit Lands first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Over the past six weeks, investors have pulled roughly $5.94 billion from US spot Bitcoin ETFs, marking the longest unbroken run of weekly outflows since these funds first opened for business in 2024. Galaxy Research puts the worst 30-day stretch at $6.35 billion through June 20.

Bitcoin has been sliding right alongside those redemptions, and after a hot inflation print on Thursday, it dropped to a 21-month low near $58,000 before steadying around $59,000, which leaves it roughly 53% below the $126,080 record it set last October.

Despite the enormous outflows, the thing to pay attention to isn't the selling itself, but who's actually doing the selling. While the ETF crowd has been heading for the exits, the people who've held Bitcoin for years have barely budged: long-term holders, meaning anyone who's held for 155 days or more, own 16.64 million BTC, which amounts to close to 83% of everything in circulation.

So the supply is steadily piling up with the folks who've lived through drawdowns like this before, while the selling is coming almost entirely from allocators who showed up through a brokerage account. This is the first real capitulation for ETF holders, because it's the first time the wrapper that finally carried Wall Street into Bitcoin has shown it's losing its nerve.

The $6 billion ETF exit and who's actually leaving

If you watch how the money left, the pace tells you almost as much as the total does. The first week of June was particularly brutal, with $1.72 billion walking out the door, but by the week ending June 18, that had shrunk to just $226.8 million, a slowdown of nearly 87% in a few weeks.

Jeff Ko, the chief analyst at CoinEx, said the deceleration was a sign the selling wave is wearing itself out rather than building, with the worst of the pressure probably already behind the market.

The damage to the products themselves is still significant. Total assets under management fell from above $104 billion to around $80 billion over this period, and cumulative net inflows since launch slid from a peak near $63 billion last October to about $53.4 billion now.

To put it another way, a full year's worth of accumulated capital thinned out in a matter of weeks.

When you ask what's actually pulling the money out, the answer looks a lot more like ordinary portfolio housekeeping than some grand stand on Bitcoin itself.

Marion Laboure at Deutsche Bank now describes Bitcoin as an institutional risk asset, with ETF allocators and corporate treasuries now the marginal buyers. So when those desks decide to trim risk across the board, Bitcoin gets cut right along with everything else, and lately it's been getting cut hard.

A big part of the competition here is AI, as US technology giants are planning more than $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending for 2026. The SpaceX IPO and the pull of private names like OpenAI and Anthropic have also become a magnet for most of the speculative dollars that used to flow toward crypto.

If you look at where these sellers actually bought in, this looks exactly like capitulation. VanEck's on-chain work shows realized losses jumping 78% month over month to $714 million, with the realized-profit-to-loss ratio collapsing all the way to 0.27 from 1.11, and the bulk of those sellers had bought somewhere between $55,000 and $68,000, which means they're locking in losses right near the floor of their own range.

CryptoSlate flagged the early version of this same setup back in May, when fresh redemptions exposed BTC to Wall Street's most crowded trade. Even Strategy got in on the trimming, selling 32 BTC to cover dividend costs in its first net sale since 2022, though, to be fair, the company is still a heavy net accumulator.

Put it all together, and what you've got is coins moving out of the newest, most rattled hands and into the steadiest ones, which is more or less how the ownership base tends to reset near the end of a drawdown.

Why the price keeps sliding even as the strongest hands hold

You'd assume that a market where long-term holders own a record share of the supply would have less Bitcoin available to sell, and that's true. However, it still hasn't managed to put a floor under the price, and the reason is that supply and demand are two separate forces. Right now, demand is the one calling the shots.

Bitcoin trades only on what buyers are willing to pay, and right now, those buyers have gone quiet. Spot volumes have thinned out, on-chain activity has cooled off, and ETF trading volumes have fallen back to levels we last saw during earlier consolidation phases, so while a shrinking float can certainly hold a price steady, it can't lift it on its own without fresh demand to meet it.

The creations that carried Bitcoin all the way through 2025 aren't flowing into the funds anymore, a concern CryptoSlate raised back in March when it asked who buys Bitcoin after five straight weeks of ETF outflows. That demand began to crack in May, when ETF flows absorbed their first real macro shock in seven weeks.

That said, the $6 billion that left is still a single-digit slice of the $53 billion these funds are sitting on. CryptoSlate has previously made the case that headline outflow figures tend to overstate how much spot Bitcoin is actually changing hands.

Long-term holder flows are ten times ETF flows, and those holders are still net accumulating right through the weakness, so, on that measure, the whole sell-off looks more cyclical than structural. BlackRock has made its own version of this argument, treating much of the redemption activity as product rotation within client portfolios rather than as anyone walking away from the asset.

Nonetheless, it still looks rough in the near term. May's inflation data landed hot on Thursday, with headline PCE climbing to 4.1% year over year, its highest reading since 2023, and Bitcoin's reaction was instant: it dropped toward $58,000, dragging more than $1.2 billion in leveraged long positions across the crypto market down with it.

Wednesday alone saw another $469 million leave the funds, their biggest single-day exit since early June, which keeps them on track for a seventh straight negative week. On top of all that, a $10.6 billion Deribit options expiry cleared on Friday, with around 80% of the open interest sitting out of the money and traders bunched around a $60,000 put and an $80,000 call, which put all of that positioning right on top of the level Bitcoin is trying to defend.

And the macro backdrop is offering very little cover, because Kevin Warsh's Fed has already dropped its easing language and nudged its year-end inflation forecast higher, with the market now pricing the odds of a December rate hike somewhere around 77%.

So the divide just keeps hardening. The allocators who came in for clean, regulated, convenient exposure are finding out the hard way that the convenience never actually stripped out the volatility, and they're walking right back out at a loss. The holders who've watched this same sequence play out a few times already are doing what they've always done at the lows: waiting it out.

Wall Street finally owns Bitcoin, and the first real lesson it gave them was a measurement of how much of it these new owners could carry through a proper drawdown. For a meaningful chunk of them, the honest answer turned out to be quite a bit less than they'd signed up for.

The post Did $6B in ETF outflows just mark Bitcoin’s first Wall Street capitulation? appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Four long-dormant Ethereum wallets have turned ETH's latest drawdown into a cleaner test of buyer conviction.

The wallets received 37,602 ETH about eight years ago and have remained quiet amid much larger unrealized gains. They have now moved 33,623 ETH, worth roughly $52.5 million, according to Lookonchain, at an average price of around $1,560. ETH was trading near $1,575 at the time.

The sale puts a sharper edge on Ethereum's weakness. Long-term holders who sat through prior bull-market exits are now supplying the market at levels well below peak-cycle prices, which shifts the question from whale behavior to absorption. ETH's next recovery needs spot demand strong enough to take down old supply without turning every rebound into liquidity for dormant wallets.

Related Reading

Ethereum’s $1,500 test shows how quickly Wall Street’s crypto trade has turned

ETF withdrawals, exchange inflows and options positioning show pressure building around crypto’s second-largest token.

Jun 7, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

Old supply changes the signal

Large transfers from dormant Ethereum wallets carry a different message than routine market-maker inventory or leveraged liquidations. The relevant detail is the patience embedded in the coins. These addresses had the chance to sell into stronger ETH cycles, yet the selling began as the asset tested a much lower zone.

That makes the $1,500 area less of a simple price level and more of a conviction floor. A market can absorb old coins when new demand is expanding, but the same supply becomes heavier when buyers are hesitant, ETF flows are negative, and competing layer-1 narratives are taking attention from ETH.

On CryptoSlate's broader market board, ETH's recent decline has also looked weak compared to Bitcoin and other large-cap rivals. A roughly $52.5 million sale is small beside global ETH trading volume, but old-holder selling rarely needs to become a flood to affect sentiment. It only has to arrive while marginal buyers are already questioning the recovery setup.

Related Reading

Why Ethereum's current 35% whale sell-off may be its most bullish signal

Older ETH investors sell into a correction, while new treasuries methodically accumulate.

Nov 17, 2025 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

ETF outflows complicate the absorption story

Spot ETH ETFs add another pressure point. US spot ETH funds recorded net outflows from June 22 through June 26, removing one of the cleaner channels for fresh spot demand while the market was already digesting dormant-holder supply.

The ETF channel does not need to explain the wallet sales directly. Its importance is mechanical. If long-held coins move from patient wallets into the market, the recovery depends on who is ready to buy them. Weak ETF demand makes that absorption test harder because it reduces visible institutional intake at the same time ETH is fighting to stabilize.

Rival layer-1 activity keeps that test under pressure. Solana and other competing chains continue to frame themselves around faster consumer and trading activity, while Ethereum has to prove that its liquidity, DeFi depth, and settlement role are still enough to attract fresh capital after a drawdown.

Related Reading

Ethereum loses 10% of its DeFi market share as rival chains close in

Ethereum's lead is being chipped away by chains winning specific markets, such as BSC in DEX flow, Tron in stablecoins, Bitcoin in collateral, Base in L2 activity, and Hyperliquid in perps.

May 8, 2026 · Gino Matos

Network depth is the counterweight

Ethereum still has the deepest on-chain base in crypto. DefiLlama data shows Ethereum with about $37.2 billion in DeFi TVL and more than $155 billion in stablecoins on the network, giving ETH a structural support story that most rival chains cannot match.

The problem is that network strength and token demand are related without being identical. DeFi TVL, stablecoin balances, DEX volume, and settlement activity can support the long-term case for Ethereum, but they do not automatically absorb near-term supply from older wallets. For traders, the next signal is whether spot buyers step in when the market knows patient supply is available.

That leaves ETH with a straightforward burden. A rebound that depends only on sellers pausing is fragile. A stronger recovery needs new spot demand, whether from ETFs, direct accumulation, treasury buyers, DeFi users, or broader risk appetite, to absorb coins from holders who waited years before finally exiting.

Until that demand appears, the dormant-wallet sales will remain a live warning. Ethereum's fundamentals can still support the asset, but the market is now asking whether those fundamentals can translate into buying at the exact moment when some of ETH's oldest holders have decided to leave.

The post Ethereum’s oldest wallets are selling into the $1,500 demand line buyers cannot dodge appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin is trading just above $60,000 right now, and the network's estimated all-in cost to produce a single coin is near $84,300, so the gap between the two is roughly a quarter, leaving mining underwater on a full-cost basis across much of the network.

For years, the assumption was that this simply couldn't happen, that production cost set a hard floor under the price, the thinking being that Bitcoin miners would switch off and the market would catch itself well before Bitcoin price fell that far below what it costs to make a coin. And yet the price has now spent weeks under that line, and the network is still running fine.

What gave way in mid-June is a good illustration of how the correction works in practice. Difficulty fell 10.09%, dropping from 138.96 trillion to 124.93 trillion, which Galaxy Research clocked as the second-largest downward adjustment of 2026 and the eleventh-largest in the network's entire history.

That epoch ended up running 15.6 days against a 14-day target because so many higher-cost machines had gone dark once their margins disappeared. The protocol noticed the slower blocks and lowered the bar for everyone still hashing, so the self-correcting mechanism people like to invoke is real, and it does work, just not in the way the floor argument tends to assume.

It was never a floor

All of this comes down to hashprice, the daily revenue a Bitcoin miner earns per unit of computing power. Hashprice falls when BTC falls, network difficulty climbs, or transaction fees thin out, and it rises when BTC rallies, fees spike, or enough weak miners leave that difficulty resets to a lower level for whoever survives.

To put that in context, hashprice peaked near $63 per petahash per day back in July 2025, then sank into the high $20s by early June, a level that Hashrate Index and most operators treat as gross breakeven before you even get to debt and overhead, and it has since clawed its way back above $30 in the wake of the June difficulty cut.

In its Q1 2026 mining report, CoinShares put the weighted average cash cost to produce one Bitcoin among public miners at roughly $79,995 in the fourth quarter of 2025, with hashprice sliding from the $36 to $38 range down toward $29. It estimated that somewhere between 15% and 20% of the global fleet will end up underwater once power costs run high enough.

The thing those averages hide, though, is the enormous dispersion across operators, which is the whole reason production cost can't function as a floor. A Bitcoin miner running the latest-generation hardware below 15 joules per terahash on sub-5-cent power keeps a healthy margin in the same market where an older fleet paying 6 or 7 cents is bleeding cash on every block it finds.

When Bitcoin's price drops, revenue per unit of hash drops right along with it, and the highest-cost machines start being uneconomic, at which point their operators start doing the obvious things: selling BTC, switching off rigs, delaying expansion, renegotiating their power contracts, or raising fresh capital to ride it out.

Once enough hash rate leaves the network, difficulty adjusts lower, and the miners who stayed online get to collect a larger share of the same block subsidy, which relieves the pressure, though it does so slowly and unevenly and does nothing to stop the price from falling while all of that is grinding through.

So production costs end up deciding who can keep producing as Bitcoin slides, but they've never been the thing that decides where the slide actually stops.

The strongest Bitcoin miners survive by becoming less like miners

In earlier downturns, a stressed miner really had only two options: keep hashing or power down. But the largest public operators now have a third option: to turn the company into an AI and high-performance computing business.

CoinShares counts more than $70 billion in cumulative AI and HPC contracts announced across the public sector at this point, and it reckons listed miners could be pulling as much as 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026, up from something closer to 30% today.

The scale of the individual deals points the same way, with Core Scientific's expanded arrangement with CoreWeave alone running to $10.2 billion over twelve years, TeraWulf having booked $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue, and Hut 8 signing a $7 billion, fifteen-year lease for AI infrastructure, while Bitfarms has gone so far as to drop Bitcoin from its name entirely.

This is splitting the sector into three camps. A handful of miners have signed AI contracts and are already moving capacity and funding the shift with debt, the best example being Cipher, whose $1.7 billion in senior secured notes pushed a single quarter's interest expense to $33.4 million.

A second group is sitting on frameworks and early pilots that haven't yet turned into revenue, and a third is still tied almost entirely to Bitcoin and therefore exposed to every move in hashprice.

That divergence is starting to show up in how the market values these companies, since the hybrid infrastructure names now trade partly on contract delivery and execution risk, while the pure-play miners trade as a much cleaner bet on BTC, difficulty, and treasury policy. And then the low-cost niche operators sit apart from all of them, small and flexible enough to benefit on the occasions when difficulty resets, and cheap power frees up.

Public Bitcoin miners have reduced their holdings by more than 15,000 BTC from peak levels, with Core Scientific offloading about 1,900 coins in January and planning to clear most of what remains, Bitdeer cutting its balance to zero in February, and Riot selling 1,818 coins back in December.

To put that speed in perspective, the first quarter of 2026 alone saw public miners shed more BTC than they did across the whole of 2025, a pace of treasury liquidation that surpassed even the dumping the market saw during the Terra-Luna collapse.

If Bitcoin recovers toward $100,000, then hashprice eases back toward $37, treasury sales slow down, and hardware refresh cycles resume.

If it chops sideways near its cost of production, the sector grinds, with public miners selling coins and chasing AI deals while difficulty does some of the repair work for them.

And if it falls further, higher-cost hash rate keeps going offline, the equity gap between the hybrid and pure-play names widens, and the operators sitting on the cheapest power pick up share.

The important thing is that none of those paths breaks the network, which is the part the bear case tends to oversell. You can already see it in the way the mid-June drop has partly reversed, with block times back near 10 minutes and some of the curtailed capacity returning as the price steadied, all of which suggests the hash rate that left was reacting to thin margins more than abandoning the network.

The pivot to AI carries its own risks for network security, of course, and a cooling AI cycle would hit the hybrids before Bitcoin itself saw any relief, so the best signals to keep an eye on from here are hashprice, the cadence of the difficulty adjustments, public-miner treasury balances, and the coins those miners are sending off to exchanges.

The point that survives all of this is the one the floor argument keeps getting wrong: that Bitcoin can trade well below what it costs the average Bitcoin miner to produce a coin. It can stay there for a while, because the cost of production sorts producers; it was never going to support the price.

And the longer BTC spends below that level, the more sharply the network gets divided along it, separating the operators who own cheap power and modern machines and a credible second business from those who have simply run out of ways to wait.

The post Bitcoin’s broken production cost floor is splitting miners into survivors and sellers appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Strategy, the Bitcoin treasury and enterprise software company formerly known as MicroStrategy, has spent years turning public markets into a funding engine for Bitcoin purchases. That model helped make the company the world’s largest corporate holder of the digital asset.

Now, the securities used to power that strategy are flashing stress.

The pressure is centered on STRC, Strategy’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, a key funding instrument designed to trade near a stated amount of $100.

Instead, STRC fell to a record low near $71 on Friday before recovering to about $75, leaving it roughly 25% below par and raising questions about whether the company can continue raising capital on favorable terms.

The selloff comes as Strategy faces what some market participants describe as an $8 billion cash wall over the next two years, including preferred dividend obligations and convertible debt that holders may be able to put back to the company for cash before final maturity.

The strain has shifted investor attention away from the size of Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings and toward the balance sheet built around them.

Strategy loses its Bitcoin premium

That change became clear Friday when Strategy’s enterprise market-to-net asset value slipped below 1, briefly erasing the premium that had long separated the company from other corporate Bitcoin holders.

The metric is important because it looks beyond the spot value of Strategy’s Bitcoin. It incorporates the company’s debt, cash, and preferred equity, offering a fuller picture of how public markets value the entire structure Saylor has built around the asset.

So, when it is below parity, this suggests investors are no longer paying extra for Strategy’s ability to accumulate Bitcoin through public-market financing. Instead, they are discounting the complexity and cost of the claims sitting around the company’s treasury.

That marks a reversal from the trade that helped define Strategy’s rise. For years, the company could sell stock or other securities at elevated valuations and use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin.

The premium created a powerful loop where the higher market value helped fund more purchases, and more purchases reinforced the company’s status as the leading listed Bitcoin proxy.

But the same loop becomes harder to sustain when the common stock and preferred shares fall together.

Indeed, Strategy’s common shares fell to a two-year low of $82 on Friday. Bitcoin, meanwhile, was also struggling under the $60,000 mark.

For shareholders, the concern is no longer only the direction of Bitcoin. It is whether Strategy can keep using capital markets on terms that do not deepen dilution, raise cash costs, or put pressure on its holdings.

Strategy faces an $8 billion cash test

Meanwhile, the debate around Strategy is increasingly moving away from Bitcoin alone and toward a simpler question: how much cash the company may need if markets remain hostile.

Glenn Cameron, global head of institutional at Ooramp Bitcoin, estimates that Strategy could face about $8 billion in potential cash demands over the next two years.

According to him, the pressure comes from two places: the preferred-stock stack used to finance Bitcoin purchases and convertible debt that may have to be repaid in cash if the common stock stays depressed.

The preferred shares are already creating a heavy run-rate. Cameron puts Strategy’s annual preferred dividend burden near $1.7 billion, with STRC alone accounting for roughly $1.2 billion. That estimate is based on about 104.9 million STRC shares and an 11.5% annualized rate on the preferred stock’s $100 stated amount.

The strain grows as STRC trades further below par. The preferred was structured with a variable dividend rate intended to help pull the security toward its $100 stated value.

However, a higher rate also raises the cost of keeping the instrument attractive to investors, particularly when the market is demanding a bigger yield to hold junior Strategy exposure.

At about $75, STRC’s effective yield rises to roughly 15%, a sign that investors want far more compensation than the stated dividend rate suggests.

While that does not mean Strategy is facing an immediate liquidity event, it shows that the preferred has moved from a cheap financing tool into a more expensive part of the capital structure.

The second pressure point is convertible debt. Cameron has identified roughly $4.5 billion of notes that holders may be able to put back to Strategy for cash between September 2027 and June 2028.

The potential repayment dates include about $1.01 billion on Sept. 15, 2027, $2 billion on March 1, 2028, and roughly $1.5 billion on June 1, 2028.

Those notes become more important when Strategy’s common stock trades far below the conversion prices. If the shares remain deeply out of the money, holders have less reason to convert into equity and more reason to seek cash repayment where the terms allow it.

That is how the cash wall approaches the $8 billion figure: preferred dividends running in the background, combined with convertible notes that could require cash inside a concentrated window.

Strategy has about $1.4 billion in cash reserves against those potential demands. The company has rebuilt part of that buffer after earlier drawing it down, but it did so by selling securities into a weaker market. That helped preserve liquidity, while also raising the risk of further dilution.

Thus, the company’s choices are becoming more constrained. It can sell more common stock, issue more preferred shares, refinance debt, slow Bitcoin purchases, or sell some of its Bitcoin holdings.

However, none of those options is cost-free.

Common-stock issuance dilutes existing holders. More preferred stock adds to the dividend burden. Refinancing depends on investor appetite at a time when Strategy-linked securities are under pressure.

At the same time, slower Bitcoin purchases would weaken the accumulation story that has defined the company. Selling Bitcoin would be the sharpest break from a strategy built around indefinite accumulation.

STRC trades like ‘junk credit' as bears target $60

STRC’s decline has drawn comparisons with past crypto failures, but the stress in Strategy’s preferred stock is moving through a different mechanism.

Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence has pushed back against comparisons between STRC and Terra’s LUNA, arguing that Strategy’s preferred stock does not operate like an algorithmic stablecoin. There is no automatic peg-defense mechanism, and a drop below the $100 stated amount does not by itself trigger a liquidation event.

That distinction is important because STRC is a perpetual preferred security, not a redeemable token. It sits below Strategy’s debt in the capital stack, has no fixed maturity date, and does not require the company to buy it back at par on a set schedule. Its dividends are cumulative, but cash payments still depend on board approval and the company’s ability to fund them.

Those features give Strategy more flexibility than crypto structures built around forced redemptions or collateral liquidations. They also explain why STRC can trade far below par without producing an immediate mechanical collapse.

The market is sending a different warning. STRC is no longer being valued as a security that will naturally return to its $100 stated amount. Investors are treating it more like a yield-bearing claim on Strategy’s ability to keep paying dividends, preserve cash, and raise capital while Bitcoin remains under pressure.

That has pushed STRC closer to the language of stressed corporate credit than crypto-native leverage. At roughly 25% below par, the preferred stock reflects a higher required return for investors taking exposure to one of the company’s junior obligations.

Notably, that pressure is now showing up in the options market. Traders have built bearish positions around STRC, with notable open interest in July 17 contracts at the $60 strike.

The positioning suggests some investors are preparing for a deeper downside if confidence in the preferred stock continues to erode.

Strategy’s Bitcoin model comes under fire

The strain across Strategy’s securities has opened the company to sharper criticism from across the digital asset industry.

Ripple Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse used a CNBC interview on Friday to discuss Saylor’s financing strategy, arguing that the company’s reliance on preferred equity and other capital-markets tools has pulled attention away from what ultimately gives digital assets value.

According to him:

“Financial engineering does not drive long-term value. The long-term value of any digital asset is going to be driven by utility.”

Garlinghouse said he remains bullish on Bitcoin, but pointed to STRC’s decline as evidence that Strategy’s model is under pressure. He added:

“Team Michael Saylor wasn’t focused on the right stuff and that has hurt the overall market.”

The comments underline a widening philosophical divide in crypto. Saylor’s approach is built around Bitcoin scarcity, public-market access, and repeated accumulation. Garlinghouse’s critique reflects a utility-first view of digital assets, centered more on payments, settlement, and tokenized financial infrastructure.

That disagreement has existed for years. However, what has changed is that the market is now giving critics new evidence.

As long as Bitcoin rose and Strategy’s securities traded at a premium, the company’s model appeared self-reinforcing. It could sell securities, buy more Bitcoin, and use investor enthusiasm to fund the next round of accumulation. Falling STRC, weaker MSTR, and a shrinking enterprise mNAV have made the same structure look more vulnerable.

However, Michael Saylor has rejected these concerns, saying:

“Volatility tests every capital structure. Strategy remains focused on Bitcoin, disciplined capital allocation, credit quality, and long-term value creation.”

The next test would be whether Strategy can repair confidence without weakening the strategy that made it one of the most important Bitcoin proxies in public markets.

The post Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin machine hits $8 billion cash wall as STRC crashes 25% below par appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin enters the weekend near $60,000 after sticky inflation, heavy ETF outflows, and a failed defense of the $59,000-$62,000 zone. The May PCE print gave the market a reason to sell, but the real damage came from positioning.

Core PCE came in at 3.4% year over year, above the Fed's 2% target but broadly in line with economists' expectations.

The June 26 options expiry is the structurally heavier event, with Deribit data showing over $10.6 billion in BTC options expiring, with roughly 80% of that open interest out of the money and max pain sitting in the low $70,000s.

With BTC trading near $60,000, the gap between spot and max pain reflects how much positioning has been stranded above the current price.

The $60,000 put strike carried about $450 million in open interest heading into expiry, making it a level the market has been orbiting all week. Once expiry clears, that overhang lifts and the market finds a cleaner base to work from.

What the liquidation flush means

Nearly $1 billion in crypto futures liquidations occurred within 24 hours after BTC dipped below $60,000, with longs absorbing the largest share.

Lacie Zhang, research analyst at Bitget Wallet, noted that the flush had already removed excess long positioning, leaving the market on a structurally cleaner base than the $58,000 to $60,000 range implies.

BTC dominance is holding near 55% according to live CoinGecko data, with BTC and ETH showing stronger holder conviction and contained sell-side supply, while selling in mid- and small-cap altcoins has been more concentrated.

Blue-chip L1s and yield-generating sectors have also attracted defensive capital from investors choosing to stay productive within crypto.

Zhang frames this as capital consolidating into higher-quality assets, a pattern that has historically appeared closer to recovery phases, with prolonged weakness tending to produce far broader deterioration in breadth.

BTC dominance holding while prices correct points toward repositioning within crypto, with capital staying selective and concentrated in the highest-conviction assets.

The ETF channel goes quiet

Farside Investors' data show spot Bitcoin ETFs posted over $1.1 billion in outflows between June 24 and 25. That two-day stack created a visible, recurring sell channel during US trading hours, with redemptions translating directly into spot supply.

ETF trading is paused until June 29, which makes the next 72 hours a test of native crypto liquidity, as spot buyers, perpetual futures markets, and on-chain holders operate without fresh institutional redemption flow hitting the bid.

Zhang puts the July catalyst: if ETF outflows stabilize after expiry and volatility normalizes, Bitcoin could post a stronger recovery than the current consensus implies.

The levels that decide it

BTC's intraday low on June 25 reached $58,189, and live data shows an intraday low near $58,319, making $58,000 to $58,300 the weekend's immediate support band.

A clean break below $58,000 that holds through the session would show that sellers have more to do.
Holding $58,000 opens the path to $60,000, the psychological pivot that also sits at the heaviest put strike from the June 26 expiry. Getting back above $60,000 neutralizes the breakdown narrative.

The first reclaim zone sits at $60,600-$61,000, near the current intraday high of $60,621. A move above that level shows buyers can do more than defend a wick.

From there, $62,000 becomes the key confirmation, as BTC back above $62,000 reframes the weekend as a sweep below the old range, a distinction that carries weight for how July opens.

The 72 hours that decide the July start

In the bull case, BTC holds $58,000, reclaims $60,600-$61,000, and pushes toward $62,000 before June 29. That sequence supports the forced-selling-exhaustion read, with long positioning cleared, expiry settled, and native liquidity absorbing the remaining supply.

Under those conditions, July positioning can reset from a cleaner base, with stabilizing ETF outflows reinforcing a recovery the current consensus has underpriced.

The $66,000 to $67,000 zone becomes relevant only after $62,000 is reclaimed and held.

In the bear case, BTC loses $58,000 and holds below it through the weekend session. That reframes the recent move from an exhaustion wick into lower-range acceptance, opening the path toward $53,000 to $54,000 as the next serious support cluster.

The liquidation flush Zhang describes would prove a pause, with more deleveraging required before July can build a stable base.

If redemptions resume at the June 29 open and post-expiry positioning stays short-leaning, BTC opens the week with structural weakness, resetting the bull case for a later date.

Bitcoin's July direction will be shaped by how flows, on-chain accumulation, and positioning behave in the 72 hours after expiry settles. The macro data is already known and priced, while the positioning reset is still being decided.

The post Bitcoin’s weekend test is whether the $58,000 drop was exhaustion or acceptance appeared first on CryptoSlate.

What Is Coinbase Advanced?

Coinbase Advanced is Coinbase's professional trading platform, built directly into the account you already have. It replaced Coinbase Pro in 2022 and is now integrated into the main Coinbase platform — no separate account needed. Where the standard Coinbase interface is designed for quick, one-tap buys, Advanced is designed for traders who want more control: live charts, a real-time order book, multiple order types, and lower, volume-based fees.

The best part is how seamless it is. You can instantly switch between the simple interface and the advanced trading view without transferring funds — it's the same wallet, the same login, just a more powerful mode.

What Can You Trade on Coinbase Advanced?

Coinbase Advanced gives you access to a deep selection of crypto markets with tight spreads and strong liquidity. You can trade $Bitcoin, $Ethereum, and 250+ altcoins with deep liquidity on all major pairs. Earlier figures from the platform put the number of available trading pairs even higher, with access to over 550 trading pairs with the same liquidity as the old Coinbase Pro.

Beyond spot trading, Advanced connects to the wider Coinbase ecosystem. It offers enhanced tools like interactive charts powered by TradingView, advanced order types, and access to all the other features Coinbase offers, such as staking, Borrow, Card, and the dapp Wallet.

What Tools and Features Does Coinbase Advanced Offer?

The platform is built for analysis and precision. The headline features include:

• Professional charting: Fully customizable TradingView charts with over 100 indicators such as moving averages, RSI, MACD, and Bollinger Bands.
• Live order book: A real-time view of buy and sell orders showing market depth and liquidity, so you can see exactly where the market sits before you trade.
• Multi-panel layout: A professional layout with real-time charts, order books, trade history, and portfolio management all on a single screen.
• Detailed trade history: Complete logs of executed trades with timestamps and fee breakdowns.

What Order Types Can You Use on Coinbase Advanced?

This is where Advanced separates itself from the standard interface. While standard Coinbase limits you to simple market buys and sells, Advanced Trade unlocks more sophisticated order types. The main ones are:

• Market orders: Buy or sell immediately at the current market price — the fastest, simplest option.
• Limit orders: Set the specific price at which you're willing to buy or sell, letting you target entry and exit points without constantly monitoring the market.
• Stop-limit orders: Automatically buy or sell once an asset hits a predefined threshold price, helping you manage risk exposure.
• Bracket orders: An advanced order that lets you set a limit price and a stop price simultaneously for an asset you already hold — useful for locking in profit and capping losses at once.

How Much Are Coinbase Advanced Fees?

Coinbase Advanced uses a maker-taker model that rewards higher trading volume. Fees range from 0.00% to 0.60% depending on your 30-day trading volume — and that's a major saving compared to the standard interface, where fees can run up to 4%, meaning savings of up to around 86%.

In simple terms, maker orders (limit orders that add liquidity to the book) carry lower fees than taker orders (market orders that remove liquidity). The more you trade over a rolling 30-day window, the lower your fee tier drops.

How Do You Get Started With Coinbase Advanced?

Getting started is straightforward, especially if you already have a Coinbase account.

1. Open or log in to your Coinbase account. If you're new, sign up here and complete identity verification (KYC) — this is a standard regulatory step for any regulated exchange.
2. Fund your account. Add funds via bank transfer, card, or by depositing crypto you already hold. The balance is shared with the standard interface, so there's nothing to move.
3. Switch to Advanced. Use the toggle in the app or on Coinbase.com to open the Advanced trading terminal. You'll see the charts, order book, and order panel appear.
4. Pick your market. Choose a trading pair, such as BTC-USD or ETH-USDC, and study the chart and order book.
5. Place your first order. Start with a simple market or limit order. You can view or cancel open orders anytime by selecting Orders from the Advanced Trade tab, where you'll see all your orders across every market.

Is Coinbase Advanced Safe to Use?

Coinbase Advanced runs on the same security and regulatory backbone as the main platform. It uses 98% cold storage, carries a $280M insurance policy, is SEC regulated, and is operated by a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: COIN). For most users, that combination of regulation and security makes it one of the more trusted environments for active crypto trading.

Is Coinbase Advanced Worth It for Beginners?

Coinbase Advanced isn't a separate product to sign up for — it's a more capable mode of the account you already have. The standard interface stays perfect for quick, simple buys. But once you want real charts, precise order types, and meaningfully lower fees, Advanced gives you all of it without leaving Coinbase.

The interface looks more complex at first, but the core actions — pick a market, choose an order type, place the trade — are simple to learn. For anyone planning to trade more than occasionally, it's the smarter place to do it.

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Disclaimers:

• Trading in crypto is highly risky and may not be suitable for all, as the entire amount invested could be lost.
• Information is provided for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell a particular digital asset or to employ a particular investment strategy.
• Coinbase offers simple and advanced trading in eligible jurisdictions. Advanced trading is for experienced traders and is subject to the Trading Rules. Fees on the two platforms vary; maker fees are based on volume. 

Ethereum can't catch a break. After a brutal June sell-off, ETH ($ETH) has slipped below the critical $1,600 level and is now trading around $1,578 — printing its lowest levels of 2026. With Bitcoin dragging the whole market down, the big question for traders is simple: is $1,400 the next stop, or is a recovery toward $2,000 still on the table?

Let's break down the chart, the key levels, and what it would take for Ethereum to turn around.

Why has Ethereum Price fallen below $1,600?

This isn't an Ethereum-specific problem — it's a Bitcoin-driven, market-wide flush. ETH has been one of the worst-performing majors throughout the recent crash, and the macro backdrop has been relentless: a hotter-than-expected inflation print, a Fed narrative that flipped from rate cuts to potential hikes, and persistent ETF outflows have all weighed heavily on risk assets.

$Ethereum has been hit especially hard because capital keeps flowing toward Bitcoin. ETH sits below every major daily moving average while Bitcoin dominance has climbed above 56%, leaving altcoins starved of capital and bulls with almost nothing to work with. When BTC dominance rises in a falling market, ETH and other altcoins tend to bleed twice as fast.

The damage is severe on a longer lens. Ethereum hit a roughly 13-month low in early June 2026, and from the August 2025 all-time high near $4,954, the price represents a decline of roughly 60%.

Ethereum Price Analysis: Key Levels to Watch

The daily chart paints a clearly bearish structure. After breaking down from the $2,000 region in early June, ETH has been locked in a steady downtrend, repeatedly making lower highs.

The key technical takeaways:

• $1,600 has flipped from support to resistance. The orange line near $1,600 that previously acted as a floor has now broken, and ETH is hovering just below it. That makes $1,600 the first hurdle bulls need to reclaim.
• The $1,800 level is the bigger battle. The green line at $1,800 marks the level where June's relief bounce peaked before rolling over. It's now significant overhead resistance.
• $1,400 and $1,200 are the safety nets. The yellow support lines below current price sit at $1,400 and $1,200 — the levels that come into play if selling accelerates.
• RSI at 38.26. Momentum is bearish but not yet deeply oversold on the daily. An RSI in the high 30s means there's still room to fall before sellers are exhausted — a caution flag for anyone calling an immediate bottom.

The structure is unambiguous: until ETH reclaims $1,600 and then $1,800 with conviction, the path of least resistance points lower.

Ethereum price prediction: how low can ETH Coin go?

If $1,600 fails to reclaim as support, the downside levels are clearly mapped on the chart. The next major shelf sits at $1,400, followed by the deeper $1,200 support.

Analysts have flagged similar danger zones. The $1,500–$1,600 zone is described as a critical support shelf, but analysts warn that price alone does not confirm it as a bottom — that requires sustained demand, not just a bounce. The mechanics of a breakdown are what make lower targets realistic. Once support fails, deleveraging tends to feed on itself, with the move toward the next band driven by forced exits rather than changing conviction.

The technical backdrop keeps sellers in control on every bounce. Price sits below the 20-day EMA at $1,733, the 50-day EMA at $1,881, and the 200-day EMA at $2,390 — a classic bearish cascade where the trend is down and the burden of proof rests entirely on the bulls.

A breakdown below $1,400 would put the $1,200 zone squarely in focus — a level that would represent significant further pain but isn't off the table in a prolonged risk-off environment.

What would trigger a recovery to $1,800–$2,000?

Here's the other side of the trade — and it hinges almost entirely on one thing: Bitcoin.

Ethereum's near-term fate is tied directly to BTC. If buyers successfully defend the current support zone and Bitcoin regains bullish momentum, Ethereum is well-positioned to participate in the next major crypto market advance and could establish a durable bottom. In other words, ETH likely won't recover on its own — it needs Bitcoin to stabilize first.

The roadmap back up is clear from the chart. The first step is reclaiming $1,600 as support, then breaking the $1,700–$1,750 resistance band. ETH must reclaim the $1,800–$1,900 region to strengthen the bullish outlook for the remainder of 2026, and holding above the key levels remains critical for maintaining recovery momentum. Above $1,800, the $2,000 psychological level — where ETH broke down in early June — becomes the next major target.

There are also structural tailwinds if sentiment turns. Anchored volume profile support in the $1,500–$1,700 range, plus a rise in real-world asset tokenization to $17.90bn on Ethereum's network, could attract renewed institutional demand at lower levels. And the longer-term bull case remains explicitly a Bitcoin bet — as Fundstrat's Tom Lee frames it, the bull case for ETH rides on Bitcoin's trajectory and a broader risk-on macro turn.

The levels that matter

For your Ethereum price prediction watchlist, keep these on the radar:

• Immediate resistance: $1,600 (reclaim needed first), then $1,700–$1,750.
• Major resistance: $1,800, then the $2,000 psychological level.
• Immediate support: the current $1,550–$1,580 zone.
• Downside targets if support breaks: $1,400, then $1,200.

It's official, and the timing couldn't be tighter. Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, has told its European customers it will stop providing services to them from July 1 — because it won't hold the licence required to legally operate in the bloc. For millions of EU users, this is the moment the long-running MiCA saga finally hits home.

Here's exactly what happened, what it means for your funds, and why regulated European platforms like Bitpanda are suddenly looking like the obvious safe harbour.

Why is Binance leaving the EU?

The trigger is a hard regulatory deadline. From July 1, every crypto firm serving the EU must hold a MiCA licence from a member-state regulator or be locked out of the 27-nation market, and a single national licence can then be "passported" across the bloc.

Binance bet everything on Greece as its entry point — and lost. The exchange had submitted an application in January through a local entity, but on June 24 it withdrew that bid, one week after Reuters reported the Hellenic Capital Market Commission was poised to reject it. In plain terms, Binance pulled the application before it could be formally refused.

The company is now pivoting to a new jurisdiction. After withdrawing the Greek application, Binance plans to seek authorization in France, saying it remains confident it will secure an EU licence in the coming months. But here's the catch: even if France approves it, any licence is likely to come well after the July 1 deadline, leaving Binance unable to serve EU customers in the interim.

What does this mean for Binance users in the EU?

If you're an EU-based Binance user, this affects you directly. Customers in markets including Poland, Italy, Spain and France — where Binance held local registrations that MiCA now renders void — received emails this week explaining how to withdraw their funds after the company told them it "will not be granted a MiCA license by 30 June 2026."

Binance has tried hard to calm the panic. The exchange said user assets "remain safe and secure" and accessible at all times, that it is communicating directly with affected users, and pointedly that it is "not telling users to withdraw their funds by July 1." Its head of Europe and UK, Gillian Lynch, told Reuters flatly that "Binance is not leaving Europe."

In practice, though, the reality is a service suspension. From July 1, Binance halts new spot orders, deposits, sign-ups, and Earn, staking and launchpool products for EU residents, while funds remain accessible and withdrawals stay active — the correct phrasing is "suspension and orderly wind-down," not "permanent closure."

There's one important warning here: staying put has a cost. EU users on an unauthorized platform forfeit the consumer protections MiCA is designed to guarantee. And the regulator has been blunt — ESMA advises investors to check their provider's authorisation in the ESMA register and, in case of doubt, to transfer crypto assets to licensed platforms or self-custody wallets.

Why is this such a big deal for Binance

This isn't just a paperwork hiccup. The failure to get EU approval marks a major setback for an exchange that has spent years trying to position itself as compliant after a long string of penalties and lawsuits around the world. 

The history is heavy. In 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to money laundering and breaching international financial sanctions, agreeing to pay more than $4.3bn to US authorities, while founder Changpeng Zhao resigned as CEO, pleaded guilty to a criminal charge, served four months in US prison and was later pardoned. Those concerns echoed right into this licensing process — the Greek application was reviewed jointly by authorities in Greece, Ireland and Latvia, which raised concerns about the company's legal history and complex corporate structure.

The bigger picture: a great regulatory reshuffle

Binance is the biggest name caught out, but it's far from alone. MiCA is reshaping the entire European crypto landscape, and the bar is brutally high. According to ESMA, only around 250 companies currently hold full authorisation — down from more than 1,200 providers previously active in the EU, a conversion rate of less than one in five.

That shakeout creates clear winners and losers. Firms that are already regulated stand to benefit, since an "EU passport" lets them serve customers across all 27 member states without further national hurdles — and among the already-licensed players is Bitpanda, which holds licences in Austria (FMA), Germany (BaFin) and Malta (MFSA).

What are other regulated EU Binance alternatives?

If you're an EU crypto user weighing your options as unregulated exchanges retreat from the bloc, the priority is simple: move to a platform that's fully licensed and built for Europe from the ground up.

Bitpanda fits that description precisely. It's a European-headquartered exchange holding BaFin regulation in Germany alongside its Austrian and Maltese licences — exactly the MiCA-aligned, fully regulated status that Binance is now scrambling to obtain. For users who value maximum capital security and regulatory clarity, that distinction matters more today than it ever has.

And right now, there's a strong incentive to make the switch. Through a limited CryptoTicker × Bitpanda campaign, new users can claim:

• 3% Bitcoin cashback on crypto investments made via Bitpanda.
• A €25 BTC welcome bonus, credited after your first trade of at least €100.

A heads-up worth acting on: the promo allocation is strictly limited (first come, first served), and the campaign runs only until July 5. Once the cap is reached, the offer closes.

👉 Claim the 3% cashback + €25 BTC bonus on Bitpanda here.
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If you're checking crypto prices today, brace yourself: it's a sea of red. Bitcoin ($BTC) has slipped back below the $60,000 mark once again, dragging nearly the entire market down with it. After a brutal inflation-driven sell-off, the world's largest cryptocurrency is now trading around $59,586 — and almost every major coin is bleeding alongside it.

Let's break down exactly where crypto prices stand today, which coins are getting hit hardest, and what's behind this latest leg lower.

What are the crypto prices today?

The damage is broad and deep. Here's where the top of the market sits right now:

• Bitcoin ($BTC): ~$59,586 — down 3.39% on the day, down 4.35% over 7 days, and a painful 31.91% in the red year-to-date. Market cap still commands a massive $1.19T.
• Ethereum ($ETH): ~$1,550 — the worst major performer, down 5.80% on the day and a brutal 47.73% YTD.
• XRP ($XRP): ~$1.03 — down 4.49% on the day and down 8.34% over the week, clinging to the $1 line with a 43.96% YTD loss.
• BNB ($BNB): ~$565 — holding up best among the large caps, down just 0.53% on the day.
• Solana ($SOL): ~$69 — down 0.94% on the hour but actually up 1.07% over 7 days, a rare pocket of relative strength.
• Dogecoin ($DOGE): ~$0.074 — among the heaviest weekly losers, down 9.77% over 7 days.

Two names buck the trend worth noting. TRON ($TRX) is roughly flat and remains one of the only majors in the green year-to-date, up 13.25%. And Hyperliquid ($HYPE), despite a 5.46% weekly dip, is the standout of the entire board with a staggering 148.16% YTD gain — a reminder that even in a bloodbath, isolated strength exists.

Why is Bitcoin below $60,000 again?

The trigger this time was macro, not crypto-specific. The catalyst was the US Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report, which showed inflation running hotter than economists had forecast — and because PCE is the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure, an upside surprise immediately raises the probability that the Fed keeps interest rates elevated for longer.

The numbers were ugly. Headline PCE inflation rose to 4.1% year-over-year in May, the highest reading since 2023 and more than double the Fed's 2% target. Higher-for-longer rates are kryptonite for risk assets — when government bonds yield 4.5–5%, capital rotates out of speculative plays like crypto and into safe yield.

The market repriced instantly. The inflation shock triggered $1.48 billion in crypto-wide liquidations within 24 hours, with long positions bearing the brunt at $1.21 billion of that total and Bitcoin alone seeing $665 million in forced exits. At its worst, the drop was severe — Bitcoin printed a 21-month low of $58,115 during the session before staging a partial recovery.

What else is dragging crypto prices down?

The inflation print was the spark, but several forces are amplifying the damage at once.

First, the Fed outlook has structurally shifted. Markets repriced the probability of a December rate hike to roughly 77%, with Bank of America now expecting three rate increases in 2026 and Deutsche Bank forecasting two hikes starting in September. The market has gone from pricing cuts to pricing hikes — a brutal reversal for crypto.

Second, the AI trade keeps stealing crypto's capital. AI infrastructure stocks continue pulling speculative capital away from crypto, and the Nasdaq 100 erased an intraday rally on the same inflation news, with the two markets tracking each other closely all year.

Third, there's a massive options expiry landing today. The largest quarterly options settlement of 2026 is clearing on Deribit, with $10.6 billion in open interest, 80% of positions out of the money, and max pain sitting at $72,000 — roughly $12,000 above the current spot price. The market was positioned for higher prices that simply never arrived.

On top of all that, the fear is palpable. The Fear and Greed Index is sitting deep in Extreme Fear, around 20–23.

What are the key levels to watch?

With $60,000 broken again, the technical map matters more than ever. The $59,000 level is the market's load-bearing floor today, and a close below it shifts the next reference point to $55,000, with deeper bearish targets at $52,000 and below still on the table.

On the way back up, the bulls have work to do. The first resistance cluster sits at $61,800–$62,000, while the $63,000–$64,400 zone — where the 21-day EMA sits — would need sustained buying to break.

Crypto's most important piece of US legislation just picked up an opponent almost nobody saw coming: the Catholic Church. And it lands at the worst possible moment for a market already deep in the red, with Bitcoin ($BTC) changing hands around $59,800 after slipping below the psychological $60,000 line this week.

This isn't a fringe objection. It's a coordinated, faith-based campaign aimed squarely at the provision the crypto industry has called a red line — and it's reshaping the math on whether the CLARITY Act passes before Congress breaks for August.

Why Are Catholic Leaders Opposing the CLARITY Act?

On June 23, a coalition delivered a letter to Senate leadership opposing a core section of the bill. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, more than 80 Catholic leaders, organizations and advocates warned that provisions in the House-passed CLARITY Act could weaken safeguards against illicit finance and create opportunities for criminal organizations to exploit digital asset networks. The letter was organized by the Alliance to End Human Trafficking, a faith-based nationwide network.

The framing was explicitly moral. "The Catholic Church has long taught that economic systems and markets must ultimately serve the human person, especially the poor, vulnerable, and those at greatest risk of exploitation," the letter said, adding that innovation "cannot come at the expense of human dignity or public accountability."

The market mood was already grim as the news circulated. Ethereum ($ETH) was trading near $1,567, down sharply on the day, while XRP ($XRP) hovered around $1.04 and Solana ($SOL) sat near $65 — a sea of red across the majors.

What Is Section 604 of the CLARITY Act (the BRCA Provision)?

The dispute isn't about crypto regulation broadly. It targets one specific mechanism. At the center of the objections is Section 604 of the CLARITY Act, commonly known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, or BRCA, which would provide legal protections for developers of decentralized blockchain software by limiting when they could be held liable for activities conducted by users of their software. 

Here's why both sides are dug in. The coalition argues that by removing non-custodial developers from the money-transmitter classification, Section 604 strips away the transaction-monitoring and suspicious-activity-reporting obligations that anti-money-laundering frameworks depend on. The industry sees it as essential protection for builders. Many crypto industry leaders have said the BRCA is a red line, and that they would not support the legislation if it were removed.

That's the deadlock: the exact clause the church wants stripped is the one the industry refuses to give up. Resolving the objection one way breaks the bill for the other side.

How Does the CLARITY Act Affect Bitcoin and Crypto Prices?

A single advocacy letter doesn't move $BTC on its own. But it matters because of where it lands and what it represents.

The CLARITY Act has been one of the few genuine bullish catalysts traders were counting on. With Bitcoin ($BTC) stuck under $60,000 and sentiment already battered by macro headwinds and ETF outflows, the market needs a reason to turn — and clean, fast passage of the bill was supposed to be that reason. Anything that lowers the odds of passage chips away at one of the last remaining upside narratives.

And the odds are not encouraging. Polymarket currently assigns a 42% probability that President Trump will sign the CLARITY Act before the end of 2026. The Catholic intervention doesn't help. A coalition letter targeting the bill's most industry-critical provision, arriving from an unexpected moral quarter, does not improve those odds.

The deeper problem is political optics. It hands opponents a ready-made floor-speech frame: that a vote for the provision is a vote against the tools that catch traffickers — a framing that does not have to be legally accurate to be politically effective. For a market hoping for a confidence boost, that's the opposite of helpful — and it helps explain why $ETH, $XRP and $SOL have struggled to find a floor alongside $Bitcoin.

What Other Opposition Is the CLARITY Act Facing?

The trafficking-safeguard fight is the newest pressure point, but it's far from the only one. The bill is being squeezed from several directions at once. It faces opposition from Wall Street, which wants language added restricting stablecoin rewards; from Native American tribes, which want clauses limiting prediction markets' sports-based wagers; and from some Democrats, who insist the bill must restrict the crypto ventures of President Trump and his family.

That fragmentation is the real danger for anyone holding $BTC and hoping for a catalyst. Each opposition bloc targets a different provision, which means resolving one does not resolve another. The church isn't acting in isolation either — law enforcement groups representing prosecutors, sheriffs and police chiefs sent their own letter warning that the bill's regulatory gaps could make it harder to trace financial flows tied to trafficking and organized crime.

The industry, for its part, is pushing back hard. Digital Chamber CEO Cody Carbone argued that Section 604 simply ensures non-custodial developers who build software tools are not unfairly penalized or treated under the same regulatory burdens as traditional banks.

Will the CLARITY Act Pass Before the August Recess?

For traders watching $BTC for a breakout, the timeline is everything. With the legislative clock ticking toward the August recess, the CLARITY Act sits on the Senate floor calendar but still requires at least seven Democratic votes to clear the 60-vote cloture threshold — and if it fails to advance before the summer recess, negotiations will be pushed into the fall.

That fall window is treacherous. Many industry leaders have said that if the bill cannot pass by next month, it is unlikely to become law this year, given the looming November midterms. In other words, the trafficking-safeguard objection isn't just one more complaint — it's friction at the precise moment the bill can least afford delay.

The seasoned investor has little faith in Bitcoin's staying power, expecting crypto to quietly fade away over time.

Securitize expects to begin trading next week under the ticker symbol “SECZ,” following the completion of a merger with a blank-check firm.

A coalition of 19 organizations—including every major AI lab and Wall Street banks—just built the security team that open-source maintainers never had.

Senators are seeking answers from the CFTC about recent allegations of deceptive marketing from Polymarket.

OpenAI introduced the GPT-5.6 family of AI models on Friday, but only limited users can access them for now thanks to the U.S. government.

The European Union has granted roughly 230 MiCA licenses so far, with Germany leading approvals as the regulation's transitional period comes to an end and unlicensed crypto firms prepare to exit the market.

Binance's co-founder reaffirms the company's security standards, noting that it is more focused on its long-term trust than on whatever the public may think.

Millions of SHIB get sent to dead wallets in hours, pushing burn rate higher by 434.63%.

Cardano inches closer to its next intra era hard fork.

XRP has achieved June's highest weekly ETF inflow after nearly $23 million in new capital flowed into the funds all week, signaling renewed institutional interest in the asset.

Key Highlights

• Shares have declined approximately 9% in the last 30 days, with year-to-date gains limited to just 5%, currently trading near $192.53
• The forward price-to-earnings ratio has contracted to approximately 22x, down sharply from nearly 40x in July 2024
• Generate Investment Management expanded its NVDA holdings by 62.5% during Q1, establishing it as the firm’s top position at ~11.9% of assets
• Analyst community maintains a Buy consensus rating with a mean price objective of $303.84
• First quarter results showed earnings per share of $1.87, surpassing forecasts of $1.76, while revenue climbed 85.2% annually to $81.61 billion

Nvidia shares commenced trading Friday at $192.53, extending a challenging period during which the semiconductor leader has dropped close to 9% across the previous month. For the year through this point, NVDA has advanced merely 5% — significantly underperforming the explosive growth shareholders witnessed in previous periods.

NVIDIA Corporation, NVDA

The valuation picture has shifted considerably as well. NVDA currently commands approximately 22x forward earnings. This marks a substantial decline from the nearly 40x multiple the stock carried during late July of last year. At first glance, this appears to represent meaningful value. However, determining whether this truly constitutes a buying opportunity requires examining the complete landscape.

One factor supporting the optimistic perspective: major institutional capital isn’t fleeing. Generate Investment Management expanded its NVDA holdings by 62.5% throughout Q1, purchasing more than 533,000 additional shares to elevate its total position to nearly 1.39 million shares. This investment is currently valued at approximately $241.7 million and comprises 11.9% of the firm’s entire portfolio — representing its largest individual position.

Additional prominent investors have accumulated shares as well. Norges Bank established a fresh position valued at roughly $62.2 billion. J. Stern & Co. expanded its stake by more than 13,700%. Cardano Risk Management increased its allocation by 896%. Institutional ownership now stands at 65.27% of outstanding shares.

Analyzing the Financial Performance

Nvidia’s latest quarterly report delivered impressive results across the board. The chipmaker posted Q1 earnings per share of $1.87, exceeding analyst expectations of $1.76. Revenue reached $81.61 billion, surpassing projections of $78.42 billion, representing an 85.2% increase versus the comparable period one year earlier.

The company’s board of directors additionally authorized an $80 billion stock repurchase program and increased the quarterly dividend to $0.25 — a substantial jump from the prior $0.01 level. This represents a meaningful transformation in the company’s approach to returning capital to shareholders.

Street sentiment remains predominantly bullish. Jefferies elevated its price objective to $300. CICC increased its target to $268.30. The aggregate view from 54 analysts reflects a Buy recommendation, with a mean price target of $303.84 — substantially higher than Friday’s opening level.

Potential Risk Factors to Consider

Not all indicators point toward appreciation. The valuation compression reveals a narrative beyond simple “improved affordability.” Hardware manufacturers operate in cyclical markets, and profit margins face pressure as competitive forces intensify. Rival chipmakers and proprietary AI processors developed by major cloud computing companies are progressively expanding their market presence.

Insider transaction patterns also warrant attention. Director Mark Stevens divested 885,000 shares on June 18 at an average price of $210.17, generating proceeds of approximately $186 million. This represented a 14.53% decrease in his overall stake. Director John Dabiri sold 625 shares during late May at $214 per share.

Company insiders have collectively sold more than 1.9 million shares valued at roughly $410.6 million throughout the past three months. While this doesn’t necessarily indicate fundamental concerns, it merits monitoring.

One quantitative analysis indicates NVDA could fluctuate between $190 and $225 during the upcoming 10 weeks based on current positioning, with a five-week median projection around $213. The stock has recorded just four positive weeks within its last 10 trading weeks.

NVDA maintains a 52-week trading range spanning $151.49 to $236.54, carries a market capitalization of $4.66 trillion, and features a 200-day moving average of $193.00 — essentially aligned with its current trading level.

The post Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Down 9% This Month — Should Investors Buy the Dip? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• BE shares retreated dramatically from recent peak levels following an extraordinary 1,300%+ advance over the trailing year
• Chevron and Microsoft’s partnership for natural gas turbine-powered data centers spotlighted alternative energy solutions competing with fuel cells
• Department of Energy’s $17.5 billion nuclear energy investment program introduced another competing power alternative
• Prominent short-seller Jim Chanos warned of bubble conditions in AI energy stocks; Barclays established a $276 target matching current price levels
• Company insiders liquidated more than $83 million in shares net during the past year, raising red flags

Bloom Energy (BE) shares plummeted by as much as 18.49% during Friday’s trading session, bottoming at $252.02 intraday. This dramatic reversal occurred just one day after the stock reached its 52-week peak. Prior to the decline, BE had been changing hands near $309.

Bloom Energy Corporation, BE

The sharp correction arrives on the heels of an extraordinary rally that propelled BE upward by more than 1,300% during the previous twelve-month period. Such explosive gains create vulnerability when market sentiment shifts.

Profit-taking emerged as an initial driver behind the wave of selling. Following such a rapid ascent, minimal negative catalysts can trigger significant reversals.

However, several concrete developments accelerated the downturn. A newly announced partnership between Chevron and Microsoft revealed plans to utilize natural gas turbines — rather than fuel cell technology — to energize an AI data center facility in Texas. This agreement clearly demonstrates that Bloom Energy faces legitimate competitive threats within the AI infrastructure sector.

Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Energy unveiled $17.5 billion in financing designated for nuclear energy projects this week. This substantial commitment introduces yet another viable energy alternative as technology giants evaluate power solutions for their expanding data center requirements.

Prominent Bear Voices Concerns

Jim Chanos, a renowned short-seller with decades of experience, openly declared that AI energy stocks have entered bubble territory. His remarks resonated particularly strongly considering BE’s valuation had already exceeded most Wall Street analyst projections.

Barclays upgraded its price objective for BE to $276 on June 23rd while maintaining an Equal Weight stance. This target essentially capped the stock right at its then-current trading range, effectively challenging the bull thesis.

Broader market conditions offered little support. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq finished nearly unchanged that session, confirming this was a company-specific event rather than sector-wide weakness.

Competing fuel cell manufacturers experienced similar pressure. FuelCell Energy alongside Plug Power also faced selling activity in recent trading days, suggesting investors were broadly rotating away from high-flying AI energy momentum plays.

Executive Dispositions and Holder Activity

Insider dispositions have been a persistent pattern. Company executives and directors collectively offloaded over $83 million worth of BE shares on a net basis throughout the past year. Board member John T. Chambers divested 55,000 shares on May 28th at a price of $297.69 each, generating proceeds exceeding $16.3 million. Insider Shawn Marie Soderberg liquidated 35,000 shares at $279.00 on April 29th.

Despite significant insider selling activity, institutional investors continue holding 77.04% of outstanding shares.

From an operational perspective, BE delivered impressive quarterly results most recently. The company posted earnings per share of $0.44, substantially surpassing the consensus forecast of $0.12. Quarterly revenue reached $751.05 million, dramatically exceeding analyst expectations of $539.94 million — representing 130.4% year-over-year growth.

Wesbanco Bank decreased its BE holdings by 43.9% during the first quarter, retaining 29,932 shares with an approximate value of $4.05 million.

Wall Street analysts maintain a Moderate Buy consensus rating on the stock, with an average price objective of $224.36. UBS maintains the most optimistic outlook with a $322.00 target.

BE’s upcoming earnings announcement is anticipated in late July.

The post Bloom Energy (BE) Stock Plunges 18% Following Massive Rally — What Went Wrong? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Citizens maintained its “Market Outperform” rating with a $100 price target for Uber (UBER)
• UBER shares surged 5.6% during Friday’s afternoon trading session, reaching approximately $75.94
• The firm highlighted expanding Waymo autonomous ride miles on Uber’s platform as a primary catalyst
• Waymo’s cumulative rider-only miles increased by 44.5 million in Q1 2026, marking a 134% year-over-year gain
• Despite recent gains, Uber trades 8.4% lower year-to-date and remains 24.1% off its 52-week peak of $100.10

Shares of Uber (UBER) rallied 5.6% during Friday’s afternoon session following Citizens’ reaffirmation of its “Market Outperform” rating alongside a $100 price objective, emphasizing robust expansion linked to Waymo’s increasing presence on Uber’s platform.

Uber Technologies, Inc., UBER

At the time of publication, the stock was changing hands at $75.94, representing a 24.1% discount from its 52-week peak of $100.10 reached in October 2025. Year-to-date, Uber shares have declined 8.4%.

The Citizens research team emphasized Waymo’s “rider-only miles” — journeys completed in Alphabet’s self-driving vehicles accessible through the Uber application — as a significant positive indicator. During Q1 2026, Waymo accumulated an additional 44.5 million rider-only miles compared to the previous quarter, representing a 14% sequential increase and a 134% jump from the prior year.

However, the pace of expansion has moderated. During Q4 2025, Waymo’s mileage expanded 40% quarter-over-quarter and 157% year-over-year, indicating a noticeable deceleration. Citizens pointed to supply limitations as Waymo moves from its fifth-generation Jaguar I-PACE fleet to its sixth-generation Ojai vehicles. Public rider trips in the Ojai commenced in May 2026.

Geographic Distribution Changes for Waymo

San Francisco and Los Angeles represented approximately 55% of Q1 2026 mileage, declining from 62% in Q4 2025. Atlanta appeared in the reporting data for the first time, accounting for 11% of Q1 miles. Additional markets such as Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando have yet to appear in Waymo’s published figures.

Citizens observed that these statistics likely underrepresent actual activity, as emerging markets divert capacity from mature locations while Waymo continues operating under supply constraints.

This wasn’t the sole positive development for UBER during the week. Just two days prior, shares advanced 5.8% after Uber announced the addition of five new retail collaborators to the Uber Eats platform — Kiehl’s, FedEx Office, Blick Art Materials, Academy Sports + Outdoors, and Choice Pet.

Additional Positive Developments

On that same trading day, Tigress Financial Partners elevated its price objective on UBER to $115. A regulatory disclosure revealed that U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi initiated a new bullish position on Uber using long-dated call options. Additionally, Uber unveiled plans with partner WeRide to introduce a commercial robotaxi operation in Zurich, marking its second planned European market entry.

Regarding competitive positioning, Wells Fargo research indicated that Uber’s delivery platform experienced a modest 1% reduction in product pricing and consumer fees — differing from DoorDash, which increased fees by 21% while decreasing product prices by 4%.

Lime, the electric scooter and bicycle sharing company, identified Uber as an anchor investor in its forthcoming IPO.

Investors who allocated $1,000 to Uber five years ago would currently hold approximately $1,486.

The post Uber (UBER) Stock Surges on Waymo Growth: Why Wall Street Remains Optimistic appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• CSCO shares declined 4.4% Friday, reaching an intraday low of $112.86, with trading volume exceeding twice the typical daily average.
• Third-quarter results surpassed expectations, delivering $1.06 earnings per share on revenue of $15.84 billion, representing 12% annual growth.
• Wall Street maintains a Moderate Buy rating with a consensus price target of $123.14; KeyCorp recently increased its forecast to $130.
• According to GuruFocus metrics, the stock appears significantly overvalued, trading 66.6% higher than its calculated fair value of $68.30.
• Recent insider transactions show approximately $7.2 million in stock sales during the past quarter, with no purchases recorded.

Shares of Cisco Systems (CSCO) experienced a significant selloff Friday, declining 4.4% and briefly touching $112.86 before settling at $113.77. The previous session ended at $118.97.

Cisco Systems, Inc., CSCO

Trading activity revealed heightened investor interest. Approximately 50.1 million shares traded hands throughout the session — well over twice the standard daily average of 24 million. Such elevated volume typically signals significant market reaction to new information.

The selloff appears puzzling given the company’s recent financial performance. For its latest reporting period, Cisco delivered earnings of $1.06 per share, surpassing analyst expectations of $1.03. The networking giant generated $15.84 billion in revenue, topping forecasts of $15.56 billion and marking a 12% increase compared to the year-ago period.

Management provided forward guidance projecting Q4 2026 earnings between $1.16 and $1.18 per share, with full fiscal year 2026 estimates ranging from $4.27 to $4.29 per share.

The company announced a quarterly dividend of $0.42 per share, scheduled for payment on July 22 to shareholders registered as of July 6. This represents an annual yield of approximately 1.5%.

Wall Street Maintains Optimistic Outlook

Despite Friday’s price action, analyst coverage remains constructive. KeyCorp maintained its overweight stance while elevating its price objective to $130. Bank of America holds a buy recommendation with a $150 target. Goldman Sachs assigns a neutral rating alongside a $125 forecast. Barclays rates the shares equal weight with a $121 projection.

Across 25 covering analysts, the consensus stands at Moderate Buy, with an average target price of $123.14 — comprising two Strong Buy ratings, 15 Buy recommendations, and eight Hold ratings.

CICC Research upgraded its target to $125 with an outperform designation in May. Conversely, Zacks downgraded the stock from strong buy to hold in April.

The company commands a market capitalization of $448.42 billion, trades at a price-to-earnings multiple of 36.94, and carries a beta coefficient of 1.01. The 50-day moving average stands at $109.17, while the 200-day moving average registers $89.29.

Valuation Metrics Raise Concerns

GuruFocus presents a more cautious perspective. Its GF Value methodology calculates Cisco’s fair value at $68.30, suggesting the current market price exceeds this estimate by approximately 66.6%. This disparity results in a classification of “Significantly Overvalued.”

The stock’s present P/E ratio of 36.9x substantially exceeds its five-year median of 19.8x — representing a premium of roughly 87%.

The company achieves a GF Score of 81 out of 100, earning solid ratings for profitability (8/10) and growth (8/10), but receiving only 3/10 for valuation.

Insider transaction patterns warrant attention. During the previous three months, company insiders disposed of approximately $7.2 million worth of shares, with no documented purchases. EVP Thimaya Subaiya divested 7,127 shares on June 16 at an average price of $119.91. EVP Oliver Tuszik sold 2,607 shares on June 11 at $121.12. Both transactions occurred through predetermined Rule 10b5-1 trading arrangements.

Institutional ownership accounts for 73.33% of outstanding shares. Multiple major investment firms expanded their stakes during the fourth quarter, including Truist Financial, which maintains a position exceeding 4.3 million shares.

The stock’s 52-week trading range spans from $65.75 to $130.37, positioning Friday’s closing price toward the upper portion of this spectrum.

The post Cisco (CSCO) Stock Plunges 4.4% Despite Beating Earnings: Here’s Why appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Chief Accounting Officer Emily Ho offloaded 1,860 SNOW shares at $232.245 apiece, generating proceeds of $431,975 on June 24, 2026.
• The stock was priced at $248.96 when the transaction was disclosed, representing a gain over Ho’s sale price.
• Recent months have witnessed significant insider disposals, notably director Frank Slootman’s May divestment of 437,076 shares worth more than $110 million.
• The cloud data company’s latest quarterly earnings exceeded Wall Street forecasts — posting $0.39 earnings per share against $0.32 projections, while revenue surged 33.5% annually to reach $1.39 billion.
• Wall Street maintains an optimistic stance with a “Moderate Buy” consensus and price target averaging $293.53.

On June 24, 2026, Emily Ho, serving as Snowflake’s Chief Accounting Officer, executed a sale of 1,860 SNOW shares priced at $232.245 each, totaling $431,975 in transaction value. When the regulatory filing became public, shares were changing hands at $248.96 — indicating the stock had appreciated beyond her disposal price.

Snowflake Inc., SNOW

Following this divestment, Ho maintains direct ownership of 41,283 shares, which encompasses holdings connected to unvested restricted stock units.

This transaction represents just one piece of a broader pattern of insider activity at Snowflake. On May 29, director Frank Slootman divested 437,076 shares at a mean price of $252.43, generating proceeds exceeding $110 million. This disposal occurred through a predetermined Rule 10b5-1 trading arrangement and slashed his stake by approximately 92%.

Director Michael Speiser similarly unloaded 50,338 shares in April at $148.21 each. Collectively, company insiders have disposed of 1,702,704 shares valued at approximately $390 million during the past quarter. Current insider ownership represents roughly 4.80% of outstanding shares.

Institutional Money Flows in Opposite Direction

Contrary to insider behavior, institutional capital has been accumulating SNOW positions. Union Bancaire Privee UBP SA expanded its holdings by an impressive 521.5% during Q1, concluding the period with 224,795 shares worth approximately $33 million.

Brighton Jones LLC increased its allocation by 90% in the fourth quarter. Intech Investment Management boosted its stake by 24% in Q1. Institutional ownership now comprises approximately 65% of SNOW’s shareholder base.

SNOW commenced Friday’s trading session at $248.29. The equity trades within a 52-week range spanning $118.30 to $284.99. The 50-day moving average rests at $191.99, considerably beneath current levels, while the 200-day average sits at $189.19. The company commands a market capitalization of $86.06 billion.

Snowflake’s most recent earnings announcement on May 27 revealed EPS of $0.39 — surpassing the $0.32 analyst consensus by $0.07. Revenue registered at $1.39 billion, exceeding expectations of $1.32 billion and representing a 33.5% year-over-year increase.

The organization continues operating at a deficit. Net margin stands at -23.79%, accompanied by a negative return on equity of -50.50%. Full-year EPS projections anticipate -$1.87.

Wall Street Maintains Confident Outlook

The wave of insider disposals hasn’t significantly altered analyst perspectives. JPMorgan elevated its price objective to $285 while maintaining an “Overweight” designation following Q1 results. Truist advanced its target to $300, pointing to encouraging signals from Snowflake Summit 2026. UBS confirmed its “Buy” stance with a $370 projection.

Sanford Bernstein lifted its target to $250 while preserving a “Market Perform” rating. Evercore maintains a more conservative $200 objective.

Among 41 analyst assessments, 34 recommend Buy, five suggest Hold, and one advises Sell — including one Strong Buy. The consensus price target reaches $293.53.

Regarding business developments, Unlimitail chose Snowflake’s infrastructure to support a retail media network utilizing Data Clean Rooms capabilities. Rival Databricks announced its data warehousing operations achieved a $1.5 billion annual run rate, fueled by artificial intelligence demand.

SNOW’s year-to-date price appreciation registers at 3.51%, with typical daily trading volume hovering around 8.6 million shares.

The post Snowflake (SNOW) Stock: Insiders Dump $390M While Analysts Maintain Strong Buy Ratings appeared first on Blockonomi.

Michael Saylor and Strategy weren’t focused on the right features of bitcoin and how to build their own strategy around it, which is now hurting the overall cryptocurrency market, said Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse.

In a recent interview with CNBC, he doubled down that the long-term value of a certain asset is its utility, not just speculative products made to accumulate it, referring to Strategy’s STRC.

They Hurt the Market

Ever since Strategy conducted its first BTC sale in four years by the end of May, it has become a hot topic of discussion within the cryptocurrency community despite its subsequent purchases, which were a lot larger. The latest to weigh in on the matter was Ripple’s CEO, who noted that Strategy’s purchases had “added some excitement on the way up and now that’s compounding on the way down as well.”

He focused on STRC, the company’s Stretch stock, which is used to raise funds by promising high yields, and deploy the proceeds to accumulate more bitcoin. Although Saylor has refrained from calling it leverage, Garlinghouse believes that’s exactly what it is, and the market has started to see how it can compound negatively when BTC’s price corrects.

STRC continues to trade 25% below its par price of $100, which Garlinghouse believes is a “pretty damning indictment, and I don’t think it has helped the market.” He added that creating long-term value should be the company’s focus, while “financial engineering” doesn’t.

“Long-term value of any digital asset is going to be driven by utility. If it’s solving a problem at scale for real customers, you are going to see liquidity, you are going to see demand, you are going to see trust in that asset. Those things compound in a positive way.”

He concluded that he remains bullish on bitcoin and believes investors should be greedy in the current market environment, given the asset’s 50%+ correction from its October 2025 top.

XRP in Focus

After commenting on how BTC should act as digital gold and how much easier it would be to move funds with Bitcoin rather than the precious metal, Garlinghouse turned his attention to Ripple’s native cross-border token and its utility. He explained that XRP’s utility is focused on payments and “leveraging the speed and efficiency of that blockchain for institutions.”

He added that the company has seen “tremendous demand” by clearing $16 trillion in payments in 2025 alone in the prime brokerage business, probably through acquisitions.

“Ripple’s strategy from the beginning has been how to bring traditional finance into the modern architecture of blockchain. And now, through some acquisitions, we have a tremendous opportunity to bring that in.”

The post Ripple CEO Praises XRP, Questions Strategy’s Impact on Bitcoin and Crypto appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The spot exchange-traded funds tracking the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap have continued their highly adverse streak, making it now seven consecutive weeks in the red.

The last five trading days were particularly painful as the spot BTC ETFs recorded their second-worst performance in terms of net flows since their inception two and a half years ago.

Spot BTC ETFs Bleed Hard

CryptoPotato has repeatedly reported on the poor performance of the spot Bitcoin ETFs, but the two weeks before the one that ended on June 26 brought some glimmer of hope. Although both were still in the red, the actual withdrawals were more modest, $316 million and $227 million, respectively, down from the $1.72 billion during the first week of June.

However, investors stepped up on the withdrawal button hard once again, pulling out $1.79 billion in total from the funds. This made it the worst week in terms of net flows since late February 2025, when the number stood at $2.61 billion.

The cumulative total net inflows have dropped to $51.61 billion. Recall that the number stood at above $59.30 billion by the middle of May. This means that the ETFs have lost almost $8 billion in less than two months.

If we break the data down to daily net outflows, Thursday stands out as the most painful day with $696 million leaving the funds, followed by $469 million on Wednesday, $444.5 million on Friday, and a more modest $90.66 million on Monday and $68 million on Tuesday.

The continuous outflows from the ETFs are among the most evident reasons why the underlying asset’s price keeps struggling as it plunged to a new multi-year low of $58,000 a few days ago. Analysts are convinced that the flows have to stabilize before BTC has a chance of a more profound recovery.

ETH ETFs in Red, Too

The landscape around the spot Ethereum ETFs is not that much different, just the scale is smaller. The funds have been in the red for seven consecutive weeks as well, and the net outflows from the past week were a lot higher than the previous two. More specifically, the ETFs bled $15 million during the second week of June and $10 million during the third. During the last one, though, investors took out $273.34 million.

The total net flows have dropped from $12.09 billion in mid-May to well under $11 billion as of Friday’s close. Tuesday and Thursday saw the most net withdrawals, with $82.35 million and $81.87 million, respectively.

The post Bitcoin ETFs Set Another Anti-Record as $1.8B Left the Funds Weekly appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s price went through a highly volatile and mostly painful ride throughout June, dumping to a multi-year low first at $59,000 before another one at $58,000.

Analysts continue to debate whether this cycle’s bottom has been reached or not, but Ali Martinez recently published a post on his views about the current accumulation zone and whether it’s a proper entry level.

History Says Yes

In the post specifically designated to bitcoin’s 200-week Simple Moving Average (SMA), the popular analyst noted that the asset has rarely traded below it for a longer period. And when it has dipped below it, the subsequent rally has shown that those moments “have consistently marked exceptional long-term accumulation opportunities.”

Since the 200-week SMA currently sits at $63,500, a level that BTC lost earlier this week, Martinez concluded that “This is exactly when you want to deploy a dollar-cost averaging strategy.”

In the more detailed post on BTC’s market structure, though, the analyst admitted that bitcoin trading below the 200-week SMA doesn’t necessarily mean it has bottomed out. In fact, he noted that the asset can still dip further south and outlined potential targets at $54,000 or even $40,000. If that’s the case, investors might want to double down on their DCA strategy, he argued.

“Spreading buy orders across the $58,000 to $40,000 range allows you to build a position while the asset trades at a technical discount.”

Martinez believes $63,500 remains BTC’s most significant level now, as if it registers a “high-timeframe reclaim of the 200-week SMA as macro support,” it would suggest the early stages of a new bull run.

When Bottom?

Each leg down opens the door for analysts to continue the always-hot debate over whether the bottom is in or if more pain lies ahead. Martinez brought up BTC’s historical performance after the aforementioned 200-week SMA came into play. Each of his four examples delivered massive gains after bitcoin tested that level in 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2022.

As such, he determined that the bottom is “almost in” and outlined the precise gains registered from bottom to top.

• August 2015: Bitcoin touched the 200-week SMA and launched a bull market, rallying over 8,500%.
• December 2018: A test of this moving average triggered a swift 267% recovery.
• March 2020: The COVID-induced liquidity flush saw Bitcoin validate the 200-week SMA as support before surging 1,125%.
• June 2022: For the first time ever, Bitcoin dipped and consolidated below the moving average until December 2022. Once the line was reclaimed, it initiated a 680% expansion.

The post Bitcoin’s Price Has Finally Entered the Buy Zone: Analyst Maps Out Big Targets appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Blockchain payments company Ripple has released its 2025 Annual Impact Report, detailing support for education, financial inclusion, sustainability, and humanitarian programs. Since 2018, the company has donated more than $250 million, including over $70 million contributed in 2025.

The report also highlighted how Ripple’s blockchain tools, including the XRP Ledger and the RLUSD stablecoin, supported projects focused on economic opportunity and financial access. These efforts included programs in emerging markets, microfinance, and humanitarian aid through partnerships with nonprofit organizations.

Ripple Expands Its Global Impact

Ripple committed $25 million in RLUSD to support underserved U.S. small business owners and career programs for military veterans. The company also helped partners deploy $53.6 million and supported nearly 12,000 water and sanitation loans through Water.org.

Several non-profit partners described Ripple’s funding as long-term support rather than one-time donations. The International Rescue Committee also continued exploring stablecoins as a tool for delivering faster cash assistance during humanitarian emergencies.

The report also outlined Ripple’s support for blockchain research and education through its University Blockchain Research Initiative. Now in its seventh year, the program spans 62 universities, has awarded $74 million since 2018, and supported 198 XRPL projects in 2025.

Research funded through the initiative covered stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, decentralized finance infrastructure, cryptographic security, interoperability, artificial intelligence governance, and blockchain applications. Some projects focused on quantum-resistant improvements for the XRP Ledger, privacy technologies, and tools to detect price manipulation in decentralized finance markets.

Progress Across Climate and Community Initiatives

Ripple’s report highlighted its environmental efforts through blockchain-based climate projects. The company said it has invested $31 million in climate initiatives and retired 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through sustainable aviation fuel credits in 2025. It also plans to retire 93,000 tonnes by 2030.

Beyond environmental initiatives, Ripple said employee participation reached its highest level since the program began. About 80% of employees joined volunteering and donation efforts, supporting 544 nonprofit organizations while raising $550,000 for charitable causes.

Alongside these social and environmental efforts, Ripple highlighted broader blockchain adoption through its programs. The firm said active users increased 37% and transactions rose 113% year over year. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger expanded from $24.7 million to $568 million during 2025, while total network transactions surpassed 3.8 billion.

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With just a few days left in June, it’s safe to say that bitcoin would require nothing short of a miracle to end the month in the green, as current data show a substantial 18% decline.

On-chain data depicts a few key factors behind BTC’s latest nosedive and what has to change for a stronger July.

Demand Lacks

In a recent post on X, popular analyst Ali Martinez explained that bitcoin accumulation levels have stalled for the past seven months.

“Bitcoin apparent demand has remained negative for 208 consecutive days, recently dropping to a new low of -273,000 BTC.”

The evident decline in this metric indicates that real spot market demand has fallen, as it compares new BTC creation to the movement of existing inventory. The trend change came after the massive liquidation event in early October, when over $19 billion was wiped out in a single day.

From November 9, 2025, to May 31, 2026, this demand “hovered quietly in negative territory between 0 and -150,000 BTC, indicating a mild but steady distribution of supply,” Martinez added. However, the metric plummeted to -273,000 BTC following the early and late June crashes and has “flatlined around this level.”

The metric remaining in negative territory for so long means a significant amount of old supply is entering circulation faster than the spot market can absorb it. This substantial divergence suggests that selling pressure continues to outpace new capital inflows, which is the first crucial factor that has to change for BTC to have a more robust and favorable July.

Just a few days ago, Martinez pointed to another metric showing no real demand for BTC but primarily from US investors. The Coinbase Premium remains deep in the red for nearly two months. More specifically, it went into negative territory after BTC peaked at over $82,000 in mid-May and has remained there ever since.

US institutional demand is key to bitcoin’s price moves and ranks as the second factor that has to change in July.

ETF Outflows

Aligned with the aforementioned developments, the spot Bitcoin ETFs have been on a massive withdrawal streak for weeks. The past week was no exception, as red dominated all days. On Thursday, the day BTC plummeted to $58,000 for the first time in almost two years, investors pulled out nearly $700 million from the funds.

Bitget Wallet’s Research Analyst Lacie Zhang told CryptoPotato that ETF outflows have to stabilize, and volatility will normalize after the massive options expiry event of $11 billion that took place on June 26.

“If redemptions resume and post-expiry positioning remains defensive, the market may stay choppy around current levels. The key point is that Bitcoin’s July direction may be shaped less by last week’s PCE print and more by how flows, leverage, and on-chain accumulation behave in the 72 hours after expiry settles,” she concluded.

The post Bitcoin’s July Outlook Depends on These Key Factors appeared first on CryptoPotato.