Strategy's STRC cracks below par as bitcoin bleeds for a fourth day 🩸

Bitcoin fell 2.5% in 24 hours to just below $62,400 on Thursday, extending a losing streak to four consecutive days, with ether (ETH), XRP (XRP) and solana (SOL) also trading lower. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) dropped 3.3%, while the CoinDesk Smart Contract Platform Select Capped Index slid 4% and the CoinDesk DeFi Select Index followed close behind, leaving smart-contract and DeFi tokens leading the decline.

Concerns about Strategy (MSTR), the Michael Saylor-led bitcoin treasury company, dominated market sentiment, with particular focus on its dividend-paying preferred stock, STRC. "Strategy, the largest listed BTC holder, has watched its STRC preferred collapse below par, and the market is now openly pricing the tail that it has to sell coins to defend the structure," analysts at Marex said. They added, "Add five straight months of BTC trading under its estimated $78k production cost, quietly forcing the weakest miners to capitulate, and you have two real sellers that were not in the frame a week ago."

Bearish positioning has intensified since Wednesday's hawkish Federal Reserve meeting, with more than $450 million in leveraged bets liquidated in the past 24 hours, the majority of them longs. Open interest in bitcoin and ether futures is largely unchanged over the past 24 hours, but SOL futures open interest climbed to over 70 million tokens, just shy of the June 5 record of 71.57 million, while XRP futures open interest hovered at its highest since October 2025, signaling that demand for leverage remains near all-time highs and pointing to potential for outsized volatility.

Cumulative volume delta data show that, except for TRX and LAB, most of the 25 largest tokens posted negative open-interest-adjusted CVD over the past 24 hours, a pattern indicating sellers are transacting at market orders and driving price action rather than resting bids on passive limit orders. Funding rates across most tokens stayed flat to negative, underscoring bearish sentiment, with ADA and XLM among those trading at subdued rates.

The article was reported by Omkar Godbole and edited by Sheldon Reback.