Stablecoins, Miners Outperform as $18B Gets Wiped Out From Crypto in June: JPMorgan

The total cryptocurrency market cap fell by 8% in June to around $2.25 trillion, giving back most of the gains from May, JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report on Monday.

“Tokens, decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) all saw market cap contraction in June,” analyst Kenneth Worthington wrote.

The move is in contrast to traditional markets as the S&P 500 index gained 4% for the month, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq climbed 6%, the bank noted. The CoinDesk 20 index CD20 fell almost 20% in June.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom for the digital assets sector. Stablecoins outperformed the rest of the crypto ecosystem in June, and their market cap was flat to slightly higher, the report said, with the appreciation driven primarily by tether (USDT).

Bitcoin miners were also an outlier. The total market cap of the publicly listed bitcoin (BTC) miners grew 19% as these companies benefited from gains due to “artificial intelligence-related power use cases.” Core Scientific (CORZ) recently inked a 12-year, 200 megawatt (MW) deal with cloud computing firm CoreWeave to provide AI-related infrastructure, which triggered a re-rating of the sector and a wave of mergers and acquisitions.

The bank noted that the data suggests that daily spot crypto trading volumes fell as much as 18% versus the previous month, and “it now appears that March 2024 was the peak for the crypto ecosystem in the current cycle both from a valuation and volume perspective.”

JPMorgan added that spot bitcoin ETFs saw their second worst month in terms of flows since launching, and estimates that the 10 U.S. spot ETFs saw $662 million of sales over the month.

Read more: Bitcoin Mining Profitability Rose in June as Market Adjusted for the Halving: Jefferies