The recovery of Bitcoin remained stalled Tuesday even after Strategy (MSTR) bought more of the largest cryptocurrency following its late May selloff.
Bitcoin was recently trading near $62,600, little change from Monday. This follows Sunday’s 4% rebound, which briefly took prices above $64,000 on some exchanges, including Coinbase.
Strategy, the largest publicly traded Bitcoin holder, said on Monday it purchased 1,550 BTC for $101 million, bringing its total stock to 845,256 coins. Although this represents approximately 48 times the 32 BTC sold in the last days of May, the purchase failed to drive up the price of the token.
The immobility of BTC also does not benefit the market as a whole. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index fell 1.8% in 24 hours and the CoinDesk 80 Index is down 1.3%.
The mood remains clearly risk-averse, with investors lacking the conviction to continue the rise.
“Bitcoin’s recent rebound shows that there is still demand when prices pull back, but investors are not committing capital with the same level of confidence we saw earlier in the year,” Daniel Reis-Faria, CEO of ZeroStack, said in an email.
“While much attention has been paid to Strategy’s buying activity, the most important factor remains the broader economic environment. Investors are paying close attention to inflation and interest rate expectations ahead of next week’s FOMC meeting, as these factors influence the level of risk they are willing to take across all asset classes, including cryptocurrencies,” Reis-Faria said.
Positioning of derivative products
- Total cryptocurrency futures volume fell 1.3% to $190.7 billion in 24 hours, while open interest remained largely stable around $103 billion. Liquidations fell 48% to $301 million, a sign that the most aggressive leverage has already been removed from the system.
- ZEC stands out in the futures markets. Open interest climbed about 5% to 2.47 million tokens, the highest since May 26, as the token traded at $472, recovering strongly from last week’s low of less than $300.
- Its 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) is positive, meaning buyers determine price action with market orders rather than passive limit orders. The problem is that annualized perpetual funding rates remain deeply negative, at around -45%, meaning shorts are still firmly in control of positioning. This creates potential for a short squeeze if prices continue to rise, as bears face increasing costs to maintain their positions.
- Open interest for WLD remains just below last week’s record high of 963.6 million tokens, signaling high positioning and increased potential for price volatility. Open interest on Bitcoin and Ether are stable near Monday’s levels.
- The 24-hour CVD for most major coins, including bitcoin and ether, is negative, meaning bears are leading price action across the entire market.
- BVIV and EVIV – the 30-day implied volatility indices for Bitcoin and Ether – continue their decline from Friday’s highs, suggesting the panic is ebbing. But first-week implied volatility in both cases is sharply elevated, indicating heightened expectations around Wednesday’s U.S. CPI release.
- On Deribit, the $60,000 put remains a focal point and is among the most actively traded strikes across multiple expirations over the past 24 hours. The one-week risk reversal is heavily weighted toward puts, with BTC trading at an 8-point volume premium to calls, a persistent signal that fears of a deeper price decline have not gone away.
Symbolic discussion
- Humanity Protocol’s H token crashed more than 80% after attackers stole the private keys – the secret codes that control crypto wallets – of a member of the Humanity Foundation and drained more than $32 million from around 17 wallets, with losses continuing to mount.
- The token rose from around $0.67 to almost $0.13 and briefly touched $0.05, a drop of around 90% over 24 hours.
- The theft is still in progress. The attacker sold the stolen H for ether and minted another 100 million H, worth around $11 million, on the BNB chain, indicating increased selling pressure to come.
- Humanity, a palm-scan identity project that presents itself as a rival to has asked users to stop touching its bridge and liquidity pools while it works with security companies and exchanges.
- The attack fits the dominant 2026 model of thieves going after keys rather than code. Solana’s Drift lost about $285 million in April after attackers seized an administrative key, and Kelp DAO lost about $292 million in the same month thanks to a single validator bridge.
- Sahara AI’s SAHARA fell about 60% to around $0.016, close to its all-time low of $0.01355. About $215 million changed hands against a market capitalization near $49 million, a turnover more than four times the size of the token and the mark of a capitulation event.
- Unlike Humanity, Sahara said there were no security issues with its contracts or products, the same line it published verbatim on November 29, 2025, when the token dropped from around 7 cents to 4 cents. It blamed a pre-scheduled transfer of 600 million tokens to its Chainlink cross-chain bridge and said team and investor allocations are intact on-chain.
- SAHARA is now down about 75% since its June 2025 debut.
