Bitcoin experienced a sharp decline on June 24, dropping below the critical $60,000 level to around $59,023 - marking its lowest point since October 2024 and a near 20-month low. The intraday decline reached almost 6% before recovering partially to about $60,600. According to 21Shares' latest mid-year report, the Bitcoin treasury company model is experiencing significant distress as King Crypto's drawdown weighs heavily on the sector. Of the 18 largest digital asset treasury vehicles tracked by 21Shares, 13 are trading at a discount to the market value of their crypto holdings. The deepest discounts are held by Metaplanet, Upexi, and Helius, while even Michael Saylor's Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), the dominant holder with 847,363 BTC at an average cost near $75,700, trades at 0.81 of the value of its coins and is underwater versus the spot price. Only five vehicles trade above their Bitcoin value, led by Sol Strategies (NASDAQ: STKE) and Tron Inc (NASDAQ: TRON).
In a dramatic shift from founder Michael Saylor's long-held "never sell your bitcoin" mantra, Strategy (NASDAQ: STRC), the world's largest publicly listed BTC holder, has authorized plans to buy back as much as $1 billion each of its preferred and Class A common shares and is launching a $1.25 billion monetization program to raise capital through bitcoin sales. This pivot may sell BTC worth over a billion dollars in an already weak market, with Strategy's preferred stock STRC having cratered in recent weeks, weakening the company's major funding channel for BTC purchases. According to Jeff Dorman, CIO of Arca, "The can has been kicked down the road for a year or two." He warns that continued cap structure challenges may create more unforced errors, noting that Saylor previously paid down $1.5 billion in debt at the expense of $40 billion in enterprise value destruction.
Ether has bounced from this critical multiyear support level twice before, in April 2025 and October 2023, while bitcoin is trading around its lowest point since late 2024. A failure to hold these support levels would leave both tokens without an obvious floor. The altcoin market saw exaggerated downside on Tuesday, with DeFi tokens ethena (ENA), jupiter (JUP), and ether.fi (ETHFI) all falling between 3.3% and 7.5% as risk appetite continues to wane. This weakness stands in contrast to traditional markets, where U.S. equities have been steady since midnight, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures posting gains of 0.03%, while the Dollar Index (DXY) added 0.25%.
BTC puts continue to trade at a 10%-plus premium to calls across all time frames on Deribit, signaling persistent downside concerns even though volatility indexes remain subdued. BTC's 30-day implied volatility gauge, BVIV, dropped by 11% to 44% on Monday and has held around that level since. Ether shows a similar pattern at the short end, with weekly puts carrying comparable premiums, while further out puts are noticeably cheaper than calls. The biggest open interest gainer among major cryptocurrencies is Dogecoin, with open interest jumping to 16 billion tokens, the highest since the October 10 crash and up from 13 billion a day earlier. However, the inflows look bearish given negative funding rates and negative 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta, with sellers appearing more aggressive.
Despite broader market weakness, stellar lumens (XLM) is maintaining bullish sentiment after DTCC, the largest U.S. financial markets clearinghouse, announced it will connect its tokenized securities platform to the Stellar network in the first half of 2027. The announcement spurred a 100% rally in late May. Lighter (LIT) is up by 23% over the past week, benefiting from similarities to the outperforming HYPE token. HYPE, the native token of decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, has gained over 4.3% in the past 24 hours and is the only major token trading noticeably in the green, though it dropped 2.2% on Tuesday. Open interest in HYPE futures remains around 40 million tokens, a level held since at least June 22, with annualized funding rates sitting close to 10%.
U.S. Bitcoin spot ETFs have experienced six consecutive weeks of net outflows, with total withdrawals reaching approximately $5.94 billion over 30 days. The total asset under management has dropped from $113 billion at the start of the year to approximately $77.5 billion, eroding over one-third of its value. BlackRock's IBIT recorded a single-day net outflow of $528 million on May 28, setting a record for the highest single-day outflow since inception. Notably, according to The Block data, ETFs still recorded a net outflow of approximately $113.8 million on June 23, indicating that the institutional withdrawal momentum has not yet shown a substantial reversal. The problem lies in the ETF cycle: when institutions redeem shares, authorized participants must sell corresponding Bitcoin directly on the secondary market, creating persistent spot selling pressure.
