First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Regains $57K Following $300M of ETF Inflows

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Bitcoin found some stability above $57,000 following Monday's slide to $55,000 as a German government entity received over $200 million worth of the asset back from various exchanges late in the U.S. day, helping revive sentiment. BTC was trading around $57,400 during the European morning, an increase of 1% in the last 24 hours, having fallen to $55,000 on Monday after a wallet address belonging to the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) sent over $900 million to various other addresses, spooking traders. In the past 12 hours, the entity received refunds from Kraken, Coinbase and Bitstamp, Arkham data shows, indicating that while the assets were sent to these exchanges, they ultimately did not hit the market.

Spot bitcoin ETFs recorded nearly $300 million in net inflows on Monday, the most since early June, when the cryptocurrency traded over $70,000. BlackRock’s IBIT led buying activity with nearly $180 million in net inflows, followed by Fidelity’s FBTC. Grayscale’s GBTC – infamous for its outflows – recorded over $25 million in purchases. Some investors may be viewing the drop in the bitcoin price as a buying opportunity, investment firm CoinShares said in a report on Monday. Traders largely expect July to be a generally bullish month for the crypto market as it has seen a medium return of 9% historically, with the trend expected to continue.

Data tracked by Coinwarz shows Bitcoin’s mining difficulty slumped from 83.6 TH/s to 79.50 TH/s on June 5, a level last seen in March, a month before the halving. That’s one of the largest difficulty drops since crypto exchange FTX's collapse, which sent bitcoin prices spiraling down more than 10% in a week, CryptoQuant noted. Downward adjustments mean a proportional decrease in the network’s hashing power. A drop can favor smaller miners and spell profits for farms that were closed due to being unable to keep up with costs. Miners were a major source of bitcoin selling pressure in June with over $1 billion worth of BTC sold over two weeks as prices ranged between $65,000 and $70,000.

- Omkar Godbole