First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Holds $21K as BTC Outflows Hit Record High

Good morning, and welcome to First Mover. I’m Lyllah Ledesma, here to take you through the latest in crypto markets, news and insights.

• Price point: Bitcoin is trading slightly down on the day, but is holding $21,000.
• Market Moves: Data from CoinShares shows a record high of bitcoin net outflows last week.

Price point

Bitcoin (BTC) is slightly down on the day after a steady weekend of trading in a range of $20,000 to $21,800. This comes as the cryptocurrency has struggled to stabilize over the last few weeks, dropping to a low of $18,001 on June 18.

Bitcoin, is up 3.8% over the last seven days, but is down about 27% over the last month.

“BTC is showing some decent support, but it’s a bit too early to get excited for any continued upside,” said Matthew Dibb, co-founder of Stack Funds.

Dibb expects the price will continue to follow macro trends, which have seen a nice bounce over the last week. “Any additional news around contagion and lender insolvency will likely lead to a swift sell-off,” he said.

In recent weeks, digital asset markets have been weighed down by reports of financial difficulties at crypto lenders, including Celsius Network, BlockFi and Voyager Digital, and at hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

If additional crypto lenders "come out with unhealthy balance sheets, we may see further liquidation of assets across the board,” Dibb said.

“It’s hard to tell right now which lenders and exchanges are safe.” Dibb added. BlockFi announced last week that it has secured a $250 million revolving credit facility from crypto exchange FTX.

Market moves

Digital asset investment products saw a record of $423 million in net outflows last week, which is the largest of all time, according to data from CoinShares.

The outflows were solely focused on bitcoin, which saw net outflows for the week of $453 million. That erased almost all inflows year to date and left total bitcoin assets under management at $24.5 billion, the lowest point since the beginning of 2021.

Short bitcoin funds – set up to bet on price declines – saw net inflows of $15 million. CoinShares cited the launch of the first U.S.-based short exchange-traded fund last week.

Ethereum saw net inflows of $11 million, ending a streak of 11 consecutive weeks of net outflows.

According to this week's report, outflows were consistent with CoinDesk's reporting last week

Latest headlines

• Morgan Stanley: GPU Demand Likely to Slow if Ethereum Moves to Proof-of-Stake Moving to PoS will also not solve Ethereum’s scaling problems, the report said.
• Ethereum Lending Protocol XCarnival Hit With $3.8M Exploit, Recovers 50% The DeFi protocol persuaded a hacker to return $1.9 million from a smart contract exploit.
• Australian Crypto Exchange Banxa Cuts 70 Staff The crypto exchange said the "crypto winter" drove such a decision.
• Nexo Sends Cease and Desist Letter to Anonymous Twitter Account Accusing It of Embezzlement The Twitter account "@otteroooo" has claimed that crypto lender Nexo embezzled funds from a charity. Nexo says the the account user is intentionally using the name of someone unrelated to Nexo.

Today’s newsletter was edited by Parikshit Mishra and produced by Stephen Alpher.