BTC's June Candle Has Zero Wicks and Zero Chill: A Solid Red Brick for the History Books 🧱

Bitcoin ended June with its worst monthly performance since June 2022, shedding roughly 20% to trade under $60,000 and producing a monthly candlestick that captured four weeks of uninterrupted selling. The June candle opened on June 1 and closed on June 30 near the low, with wicks so small they are virtually invisible on the chart, a configuration that signals complete bearish dominance and no meaningful two-sided trading. Bitcoin was recently trading around $58,857.22 after briefly dipping to $58,100, its lowest level since September 2024, before rebounding toward $59,700. The largest cryptocurrency remains about 53% below its October record of $126,080, and has now logged back-to-back quarterly losses resembling the 2022 bear market.

The slide has coincided with $691 million in U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF outflows on Thursday alone, the largest single-day outflow since May 27, according to Farside Investors data. Annual growth in U.S. ETF Bitcoin holdings has slumped to "basically zero" for the first time since the funds launched in 2024, with the ETFs now adding to Bitcoin's supply rather than soaking it up, CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno told Milk Road. "For a bottom to form," he said, that buying needs to stop shrinking and start accelerating again. Spot Bitcoin ETFs bled roughly $4 billion in June overall, and net flows over the past month showed outflows of 71.6k BTC against Digital Asset Treasury inflows of just 7.5k BTC, leaving combined flows 77k BTC in the red after adjusting for new issuance. Strategy, the largest public holder of bitcoin, 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" that could see the company sell more than $1 billion of BTC, a sharp break from founder Michael Saylor's long-held "never sell your bitcoin" stance. "The can has been kicked down the road for a year or two," Arca CIO Jeff Dorman said on X, adding that "Cap structure trades will pop up again in the future."

Derivatives markets point to further stress. Over the past 24 hours, more than $1 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated, with longs once again accounting for the majority and ETH seeing more liquidations than BTC in the past 12 hours, according to CoinGlass. Bitcoin futures open interest climbed to 778,000 BTC during Thursday's late selloff from recent lows near 730,000 BTC, suggesting traders added shorts into the dip, while ether futures open interest has remained stable near 14 million ETH since at least June 15. The 50-day exponential moving average sits around $66,913 and the 200-day EMA near $76,517, with the 50-day below the 200-day in a death cross configuration. The daily RSI sits at 34, just above the 30 oversold threshold, while the ADX reads 36.9, signaling a committed trend is in place. Bitcoin was trading below its 200-week moving average, a level that has "historically served as a critical psychological and technical floor," according to tokenization platform tx co-founder Mike McCluskey.

The macro picture has not helped. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's hawkish debut has kept traders bracing for higher-for-longer rates, with markets pricing an 80% chance of a December rate hike, and the Japanese yen slipping to 162.40 per U.S. dollar, its weakest level since October 1986 when Ronald Reagan was U.S. President. On Friday, about $10.6 billion in Bitcoin options expired on Deribit, the year's largest quarterly settlement, with Bitcoin trading far below the roughly $72,000 "max pain" level and some 80% of those contracts on track to expire worthless. On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, traders have placed an 80% chance on Bitcoin's next move taking it to $55,000, up from 72% at the start of the week. Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz, speaking in a Thursday AMA, said Bitcoin's bull case "revolves on two things," the passage of the Clarity Act and a Fed rate cut, adding that the war in Iran "has slowed the cutting cycle down."