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First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Begins June Dropping Back Below $27K
The latest price moves in crypto markets in context for June 1, 2023.
Updated Jun 1, 2023, 3:25 p.m. Published Jun 1, 2023, 12:21 p.m.
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This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
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Bitcoin and the broad cryptocurrency market sold off for the second consecutive day on Thursday with fears over inflation and continued rate hikes resurfacing. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the debt ceiling deal Wednesday night and the bill now moves to the Senate for its approval. Bitcoin was down 1% on the day to $26,800 and has lost more than 6% over the past month. While new eurozone data showed that inflation fell more than expected to 6.1% in May from 7% in April, European Central Bank President, Christine Lagarde signaled that additional interest rate rises are needed. “We need to continue our hiking cycle until we are sufficiently confident that inflation is on track to return to our target in a timely manner,” she said in a speech on Thursday.
Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is reaping the benefits of staying in Canada after rivals such as Binance and OKX set withdrawal plans. Kraken told CoinDesk its customer deposits in the country grew by 25% in the weeks following Binance’s announced departure in early May, and the exchange saw a fivefold increase in downloads of its two mobile apps for Canadian clients within a week of OKX saying in March it planned to leave. Canada tightened its regulatory framework for digital asset trading earlier this year, resulting in an exodus of some of the largest crypto exchanges. Alongside Binance – the globe’s largest exchange by volume traded – and OKX, Paxos, Blockchain.com and Deribit also all announced their departures. The most recent exit announcement was from Bybit earlier this week.
Bankruptcy claims exchange OPNX – founded in part by the principals of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) – has issued a new governance coin dubbed "Open Exchange token" (OX), which is designed to reduce trading fees on the platform. The exchange's existing native token, FLEX, surged by 16% after it was revealed in the whitepaper that FLEX can be converted for OX at a ratio of 1:100. OX is an ERC-20 token with a maximum supply of 9.86 billion. At press time, around 100 people have either minted or bought the asset, according to Etherscan. The OPNX exchange was co-founded by 3AC’s Kyle Davies and Su Zhu, along with executives from failed crypto lender CoinFLEX.
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KuCoin captured a record share of centralised exchange volume in 2025, with more than $1.25tn traded as its volumes grew faster than the wider crypto market.
What to know:
- KuCoin recorded over $1.25 trillion in total trading volume in 2025, equivalent to an average of roughly $114 billion per month, marking its strongest year on record.
- This performance translated into an all-time high share of centralised exchange volume, as KuCoin’s activity expanded faster than aggregate CEX volumes, which slowed during periods of lower market volatility.
- Spot and derivatives volumes were evenly split, each exceeding $500 billion for the year, signalling broad-based usage rather than reliance on a single product line.
- Altcoins accounted for the majority of trading activity, reinforcing KuCoin’s role as a primary liquidity venue beyond BTC and ETH at a time when majors saw more muted turnover.
- Even as overall crypto volumes softened mid-year, KuCoin maintained elevated baseline activity, indicating structurally higher user engagement rather than short-lived volume spikes.
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Bitcoin hash rate slides during U.S. winter storm while markets shrug off mining disruption
The temporary loss of mining power underscores academic concerns that geographic and pool concentration can magnify infrastructure failures, though markets showed little immediate reaction.
What to know:
- Bitcoin’s hashrate fell about 10 percent during a U.S. winter storm, underscoring how local power disruptions can strain the network’s capacity to process transactions.
- Researchers have shown that concentrated mining, as seen in a 2021 regional outage in China, can lead to slower block times, higher fees and broader market disruptions.
- With a few large pools now controlling most of Bitcoin’s hashrate, the network is increasingly vulnerable to localized infrastructure failures, even as the price of BTC remains largely unaffected in the short term.
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