First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Falls to $62K as Hong Kong ETFs Fail to Meet Expectations

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Bitcoin fell below $62,000 during the European morning, having treaded water around $63,000 throughout most of the Asian session. BTC was changing hands at about $61,670 at the time of writing, down 1.3% in the last 24 hours. The broader digital asset market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), has dropped around 2.7%. The debut of crypto ETFs in Hong Kong looks unlikely to inject any life into this sedentary market for now, with BTC products drawing just $8.5 million in volume and ETH drawing $2.5 million on the first day. Issuers expected the initial volume to be over $100 million, according to local media reports.

MicroStrategy now holds almost 1% of the total circulating supply of bitcoin, having acquired 25,250 BTC in Q1. Broker Canaccord Genuity cut its MSTR price target from $1,810 to $1,590 while maintaining its buy rating after the software company reported a net operating loss of $53.1 million following a digital asset impairment charge of $191.6 million. Canaccord said the main drivers of the new price target are continued appreciation of BTC and "some revaluation up for the software business." There is a scarcity value to MicroStrategy’s bitcoin holdings, given it remains one of the best ways for most equity investors to gain exposure to the digital asset, Canaccord added, and this setup “provides the potential for an additional premium to spot to re-emerge in MSTR shares.” MSTR sunk over 5.5% to $1,220 in pre-market trading on Tuesday.

A NASDAQ-listed coal miner has mined $30 million worth of bitcoin using excess power at its facilities. Alliance Resource Partners said in an earnings call that it had 425 BTC on its balance sheet, which it had acquired as part of a pilot project to monetize underutilized electricity at its River View mine in Kentucky. The $30 million valuation represents a gain of around $7.3 million, the firm's CFO Cary Marshall said. Marshall added that the company isn't buying bitcoin but mining it with its existing equipment. "We do have some extra capacity that we're renting out to other bitcoin miners within the data center that we've effectively built for this bitcoin mining to take advantage of the low energy costs we have," he added.

Chart of the Day

• The chart shows Google's search value for the term "Bitcoin" in Japan over the past five years.
• Despite the yen's recent sharp depreciation to over three-decade lows, retail interest in bitcoin, an alternative asset often touted as a hedge against fiat currency volatility, has declined.
• Google Trends provides access to a primarily unfiltered sample of search requests made to Google. It scales their searches from 0 to 100, with search values representing interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the selected region and period.
• Source: Google Trends

- Omkar Godbole

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