Bitcoin slid to around $66,500 on Tuesday, its lowest level since early April and a price that erases the ground the cryptocurrency held before the U.S.-Iran war began, capping a week-to-date drop of nearly 10 percent and extending a sell-off that has now wiped more than 45 percent off bitcoin's October record above $120,000.
The move has forced a rethink of the two stories crypto investors have told themselves for the past year. Bitcoin was supposed to be either digital gold that benefits from geopolitical shock or a high-beta tech proxy that rises with the Nasdaq. It is doing neither. The Nasdaq-100 has rallied roughly 35 percent over the past 12 months while bitcoin has lost about 35 percent of its relative strength, opening the widest performance gap in favor of stocks since March 2019, according to data compiled by CNBC.
Who is selling
Long-term holders, defined as investors who have held coins for at least 155 days, sold about $2.4 billion of bitcoin in the two sessions through Tuesday, Compass Point analyst Ed Engel said in a research note. Twenty-six percent of the supply that changed hands over the past 30 days came from investors who bought above $90,000.
"This cohort of top-buyers had been resilient throughout the bear market; however, they're finally capitulating as BTC approaches new cycle lows," Engel wrote. "Top-buyer capitulation is a very common theme in late cycle bear markets. This makes us more confident that BTC's bear market is in late stages."
ETF outflows extend
Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds registered their 12th consecutive day of net outflows on Tuesday, the longest such streak on record, according to data provider SoSoValue. Combined net assets across the funds have fallen to $85 billion from $107.8 billion on May 14.
Citi analyst Alex Saunders said the ETF channel matters more than any single seller. "ETF flows are the primary driver of BTC price appreciation, explaining approximately 45% of weekly return variation, and the best vehicle for tracking investor adoption/appetite," Saunders wrote, adding that the odds of Congress passing a U.S. market-structure bill, which he had identified as a potential catalyst, are diminishing.
The slide accelerated Monday after Strategy, the corporate treasury firm run by Michael Saylor, disclosed a sale of 32 bitcoin, its first sale in four years. Analysts including Engel said the transaction itself was too small to drive the move but triggered a cascade of long liquidations.
Options turn bearish
The options market is reflecting the shift. Put volumes outpaced calls Tuesday in the iShares Bitcoin Trust and in Strategy shares, ThinkOrSwim data show, and traders bought roughly 100,000 puts on Strategy against fewer than 37,000 calls. The most active contract by volume, according to SpotGamma, was the 100-strike Strategy put expiring June 18, a wager on fresh year-to-date lows.
On prediction market Kalshi, traders assign a nearly 80 percent probability that bitcoin will trade below $60,000 at some point this year and a 52 percent probability it will dip under $50,000. Bitcoin has not printed a four-handle since August 2024. Kalshi's odds that the token reclaims $100,000 in 2026 have collapsed to 27 percent from nearly 50 percent in early May.
Charlie Moon, a tech and momentum specialist at Prosper Trading Academy, said retail attention has migrated. "You're seeing old-school crypto influencers posting options trades now," Moon said by phone. "People used to whet their appetite for day-trading with bitcoin, now they satisfy that appetite elsewhere."
The counterpoint
Tuesday's reporting comes entirely through the market-desk lens of CNBC, and the bullish counterweight was largely absent from the wires. Crypto-treasury executives, exchange officials and the industry's most prominent bulls had not publicly responded to the move by press time, and the sources cited here, from Compass Point to Citi to Kalshi traders, are positioned to read the tape rather than defend it.
The next test arrives June 18, when the heavily traded Strategy put contracts expire. Between now and then, ETF flow data will publish daily, and Compass Point's late-stage thesis faces its first check: whether top-buyer selling exhausts itself or pulls bitcoin into the $50,000s that prediction markets are now pricing in.