Your Weekly Deep Dive into The World of Crypto

July 1, 2026 · 5 Min Read

GM, Readers!

A week ago, the $60K floor was consensus. This week it cracked. $1.26B in longs got cremated on a single inflation print, and $8.6B in Bitcoin options expired worthless. The CEO of the largest US exchange called it a "cool breeze."

Bitcoin opened the week at $64,242, printed $58,000 on hot PCE, and limped into the weekend at $59,940. ETFs bled seven straight sessions. BlackRock shuffled over $810M to Coinbase Prime in three days. 

Let’s get into it...

On Thursday, June 25, the BEA reported May headline PCE at 4.1%, the hottest since April 2023. Bitcoin was at $61,800. Within an hour, $58,000. CoinGlass clocked $1.26B in liquidations across 209,000+ traders, with $450M in longs torched in a single hour.

Longs walked in confident. Walked out as collateral.

“Meanwhile, the ETH/BTC ratio quietly hit a 10-month low near 0.027 (at the time of writing). The Math - 1 BTC now buys about 37 ETH (1 ÷ 0.027 = 37.04). It’s down over 35% from the August 2025 peak.”

Friday's quarterly Bitcoin options expiry on Deribit was the largest of 2026, with $10.6B in open interest. Roughly $8.6B (80%) expired out of the money on June 26. Max pain sat at $74,000. Spot was around $60,000. Max pain pulled nothing.

The bigger story is the gamma flip. Below $68,000, dealers sat in negative gamma, so their hedging amplified moves rather than dampening them. Every red candle made them sell.

When max pain stops working, the structure underneath you changes.

On-chain trackers caught BlackRock moving $257M in BTC and ETH to Coinbase Prime on Wednesday, June 24, $217M on Thursday, and roughly $336M more on Friday, June 26. Per Lookonchain, the three-day total topped $810M. IBIT alone saw $444.50M in net outflows on Friday, its largest single-day exit since launch.

Operational maintenance at this scale looks like the trade.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted on June 26: "Barely even a winter TBH. More like a cool breeze." Per River, the current drawdown from Bitcoin's $126,073 October 2025 peak is roughly 53%. Prior cycles wiped out 77% (Luna/FTX), 84% (ICO bust), 86% (Mt. Gox), and 93% (2011).

Armstrong also disclosed Coinbase cut its AI spending nearly in half, running leaner into a bear that, by historical standards, has not arrived.

The cycle could still get colder. On the data, the breeze is real.

Late last year, a Klimt sold for the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.

An outlier sure, but it wasn't a fluke. U.S. auction sales grew 23.1% in 2025. The $1-5mm segment even grew 40.8% YoY.

Meanwhile, Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok said to expect ‘zero in return in the S&P 500 over the coming decade.’

So, that's where it gets interesting.

Each environment is unique, but after dot-com, post war and contemporary art grew about 24% annually for a decade. After 2008, about 11% for 12 years.

It’s also had near-zero correlation with the S&P 500 since ‘95.*

Now, Masterworks lets you invest in shares of artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso.

Shares can sell quickly, but my subscribers can skip the waitlist:

Skip the waitlist

^{*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.}

The U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs redeemed $1.79B from June 22 to 26, a seventh straight session of outflows. June total reached $4.06B, the worst month on record, surpassing February 2025's $3.56B.

You deposit $10,000 in a bank and get paid 0.5% interest. They lend YOUR money at 7-20%. Coinbase runs the same playbook. They earn billions on customer deposits while paying you nothing. But you can flip the equation and collect the spread on digital assets you're already holding.

Learn how in this video

^{Performance varies. Yields not guaranteed. Not investment advice. Past results don't predict future returns.}

On January 9, 2022, two 20-year-olds in Los Angeles minted 8,888 cartoon ice cream NFTs called Frosties on OpenSea at 0.04 ETH each. Sold out in an hour. Discord had 25,000 members. The roadmap promised a metaverse game and breedable Frosties. None of it shipped.

Within hours, founders Ethan Nguyen and Andre Llacuna transferred the $1.1M to private wallets, deactivated the site, and nuked the Discord. DOJ caught them in LA on March 24, 2022, ten days before a follow-up would have netted $1.5M. Both were charged with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy.

Whale Intel: a roadmap is not a product. A Discord is not a delivery mechanism. Anonymous founders + no contract controls = the rug is the roadmap.

👉 Read the DOJ Report Here.

Faruk Fatih Özer founded Koineks in 2017, rebranded it as Thodex, and rode the 2021 retail mania into one of Turkey's largest crypto exchanges, pulling in 400,000 Turks hedging a collapsing lira. In April 2021, withdrawals froze. The site went dark. Özer was on a plane to Albania with roughly $2 billion of customer crypto. He was arrested in Vlora in August 2022 and extradited in April 2023.

On September 7, 2023, the Anatolian Ninth High Criminal Court handed him 11,196 years, 10 months, and 15 days on 2,027 counts of aggravated fraud plus money laundering, the longest sentence ever from a Turkish court. His siblings got identical sentences.

Lesson: an exchange that controls your keys is a counterparty, not a custodian. The next Thodex is being built right now with slick UI and no proof of reserves.

A week ago this sat near 18%. The put wall held into Friday, but the bid for downside has doubled.

Warsh retired forward guidance. Deutsche Bank now forecasts two hikes this year.

The SEC pushed its deadline to October 16. BSOL plus FSOL AUM holds near $1.06B.

Three traders' tape: whether Strategy actually pulls the trigger on its $1.25B Bitcoin sale, HYPE's July 6 monthly unlock landing into a softer tape than May's, whether the ETH/BTC ratio cracks 0.025 or finds a floor.