Corporate Bitcoin Buying Has Gone Nearly Silent, Piling Onto ETF Pressure

Quick overview

The ETF outflow story has been getting all the attention, but there is a second demand problem sitting right beside it. Corporate bitcoin treasuries, the firms whose whole purpose is accumulating BTC on their balance sheets, have pulled back sharply too, and the timing could not be worse.

Glassnode put numbers to what many traders had already sensed. Through April and May, these companies were buying at a clip that sometimes topped $500 million in a single day. That has collapsed to almost nothing in June. Nobody is dumping, but the buying that was quietly holding a floor under prices has mostly stopped showing up.

The price told the same story in real time. Bitcoin went from the mid-$70,000s to under $60,000 in a matter of days, and the corporate treasury bids that had been there on the way up were nowhere near as visible on the way down.

Strategy’s disclosure that it sold 32 BTC in the final week of May was the match that lit the fuse. The number was too small to move a market on its own. But traders were already on edge, and news of any selling from the most vocal bitcoin accumulator on the planet landed badly. Strategy did buy back in during the worst of the selloff, around $100 million worth, and the market fell through $60,000 anyway.

Around $62,500 at the time of writing, bitcoin is still trying to find its footing. ETF outflows are still running. The 11 US-listed spot funds posted another $213.85 million in redemptions on Wednesday, pushing total net outflows past $5.72 billion since mid-May.

What has changed over the past few weeks is the structure of demand. Earlier this year, corporate treasuries and ETF inflows were both pulling in the same direction. Right now neither one is doing much lifting, and that is what makes the current setup harder to recover from than a typical sentiment-driven pullback.

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Sophia Cruz

Financial Writer - Asian & European Desks

Sophia is an experienced writer, reporter and newsdesk member, mostly on the financial sectors. For the past 5 years Sophia has covered a wide variety of topics such as the financial markets, economics, technology, fin-tech and trading. Sophia has been a part of the FX Leaders team since 2017 and works on producing valuable content and information for traders of all levels of experience.