First Mover Americas: BTC Stabilizes Around $58K Following Yesterday’s Rout

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.

Bitcoin stabilized around the $58,000 mark after the U.S. Federal Reserve kept the benchmark interest rate unchanged on Wednesday. Chair Powell said the economy is too strong to cut rates while ruling out increases despite disappointing inflation figures. Having lost the $60,000 support level late on Tuesday, BTC fell as low as $56,500 yesterday, with U.S. spot ETFs seeing outflows of $563.7 million, the highest daily figure since the funds listed in January. At the time of writing bitcoin was priced at $58,282, up 1.4% over 24 hours. The digital asset market at large is up around 4%, according to CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), as altcoins such as SOL and AVAX led a recovery from Wednesday’s rout.

The 11 spot bitcoin ETFs saw combined net outflows of $563.7 million on Wednesday, according to Farside Investors and CoinGlass, extending a five-day losing streak. Fidelity’s FBTC spearheaded outflows on Wednesday, losing $191.1 million in withdrawals, while Grayscale’s GBTC saw $167.4 million pulled. Bitcoin, like other risk assets, is sensitive to changes in liquidity conditions and witnessed a brief rally from $56,620 to $59,430 on Wednesday after the Fed said it would curtail its quantitative tightening measures in June and introduced a program to buy back billions of dollars of government debt to improve liquidity in the bond market. The bounce was, however, short-lived and did little to stem the ETF outflows.

BlackRock’s head of digital assets predicts that a new wave of inflows from a different type of investor is coming to bitcoin ETFs. Robert Mitchnick told CoinDesk in an interview that the coming months will see sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and endowments start to trade in the spot ETFs. BlackRock is seeing “a re-initiation of the discussion around bitcoin,” which turns on the topic of allocating to bitcoin and how to think about it from a portfolio construction perspective. He added that BlackRock has been talking about bitcoin to these sorts of institutions for several years, suggesting there could be a lot of pent-up demand for exposure via the ETFs.

– Omkar Godbole