Bitcoin stuck near $60K as ETF outflows deepen and Fed jitters grow

Bitcoin continues to trade sideways near $60K, with the panelists framing the tape as a rangebound $62K to $68K zone pending the next macro break. The bigger story is the rotation underneath: a string of onchain bottom signals have fired (more than 50% of BTC supply held at a loss, a monthly RSI near its lowest reading in 17 years, and an MVRV Z-score close to 1.5 standard deviations below mean), yet ETF flows have run heavily negative for the past month and a bigger structural overhang has emerged.

The CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill crypto has been waiting on, is not going to clear this year. The 60-vote supermajority math does not work, and the Democratic ethics provision (banning officials and their families from trading digital assets) is now politically toxic after the disclosure that President Trump and his family booked roughly $1.4B in profits from crypto ventures. Both panelists agreed the bill is dead for 2025 absent a major political shift.

Why it matters

The loudest signal of the cycle is Saylor flipping from accumulator to distributor. Strategy executed its first major sale in years, offloading roughly $200M+ worth of BTC on Monday, with a disclosed Bitcoin monetization plan that could see up to $1.25B sold to fund buybacks of STRC and MSTR. The framing matters: MSTR had been trading below 1x mNAV, STRC had been near default, and a negative flywheel was in play, so the sell is a defensive unwinding, not a thesis change. But the optics are brutal for the largest-ever corporate BTC buyer publicly telling the market to never sell.

Layered on top is a Federal Reserve that is sounding more hawkish than the oil tape would suggest. The latest FOMC minutes showed roughly half of governors willing to vote for a rate hike by year-end, with Chair Powell offering no forward guidance. The Fed is also openly citing AI-driven demand (chips, memory, data-center power) as a source of demand-pull inflation, alongside a 10-year auction that priced at the highest yield since February of last year and New York Fed inflation expectations sitting at nearly a three-year high. The panel argued that even if oil keeps falling, AI capex and electricity demand could keep the inflation print sticky, with the Fed reportedly already tweaking its PCE methodology and eyeing a trimmed-mean version because headline PCE will not get to 2%.

The macro wildcard remains geopolitics. A peace deal in the Middle East would have been the cleanest risk-on catalyst, but the resumption of fighting in recent days has pulled that off the table and put a bid back into oil and the dollar. The panelists' base case is that the next 5-10% move in BTC comes from whichever side of the macro tape breaks first.

Market impact

For positioning, three things to watch. First, sustained spot ETF inflows: the panel's threshold is at least three to four consecutive days of solid net positive creations after a month of heavy outflows.