Bitcoin near $63,500 looks like more summer torpor, capped below $64,000 and holding above the low-$60,000s, but the flow picture underneath has reversed, said Yusuf Fakhro, partner at ARP Digital, in a note to CoinDesk.
US spot ETFs took in more than 14,000 BTC over five days into August 7, he said, the strongest stretch since May, and Q3 has drawn roughly 11,000 BTC of net inflows against 110,000 BTC of outflows in the back half of Q2. The institutional selling that defined the second quarter has flipped to buying.
Spot volumes have fallen to two-and-a-half-year lows, perpetual volumes to three-year lows, and volatility sits near multi-year troughs, Fakhro said.
Fresh demand arriving into the thinnest tape in years, when nobody is watching, is how durable bottoms tend to form. He reads bitcoin's six months stuck between $60,000 and $80,000, holding near a 50% drawdown rather than grinding lower the way the 2014, 2018 and 2022 bear markets did, as apathy rather than deterioration, with on-chain data starting to show bottoming characteristics as sentiment shifts from panic to caution.
The risk sits on both sides. Bitcoin is as stuck below $64,000 as it is above $62,000, a box rather than a launchpad, and leverage sharpens it. Perpetual open interest has held above 300,000 BTC through the summer, elevated against its average while volumes collapsed, which leaves the market exposed to a sharp liquidation move in either direction.
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