Bitcoin Breaks Below $60,000 in a $1.57B Liquidation Wave

Bitcoin traded below $60,000 on Friday for the first time in the current cycle, printing an intraday low of $59,743 before recovering to about $61,000. The roughly 4% decline on the day capped a five-session slide of about $14,000, or close to 20%, from where the asset started June. Exchanges liquidated $1.57 billion of leveraged positions over 24 hours, according to News.Bitcoin.com, the fourth day in five sessions with more than $1 billion in forced closures. Bitcoin's market capitalization briefly slipped under $1.2 trillion, and the total value of all cryptocurrencies fell to $2.23 trillion, roughly $200 billion lower.

The Level: A Round Number That Had Held All Cycle

Round numbers matter in practice because orders cluster at them. Stop-losses, liquidation triggers and option strikes sit at $60,000 in a way they do not at $59,400, so a break through the figure tends to produce selling that is mechanical rather than considered. That is what Friday's tape showed: the low at $59,743 was brief and the recovery to about $61,000 came quickly, but the level itself had been given up. The move left bitcoin down about 30% for the year to date, according to News.Bitcoin.com. It came one session after the price closed below $65,878.93, bitcoin's opening price on Feb. 28.

The Sequence: Four Billion-Dollar Liquidation Days in Five Sessions

The collapse was continuous rather than a single shock. June 1 brought $483.8 million of outflows from US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds and a disclosure from Strategy that it had sold 32 BTC for about $2.5 million in late May, its first sale since 2022. On June 2, about $1.8 billion of positions were liquidated in 24 hours; one report put the split at $1.57 billion of longs against $215.7 million of shorts across more than 272,000 traders. Bitcoin closed Wednesday at $66,965.27, then fell 4.90% on Thursday to $63,682.64 with an intraday low near $61,300, according to CoinDesk, which counted roughly $3 billion of liquidations over those two days. Friday's $1.57 billion broke down as $1.28 billion of longs against $290 million of shorts, with bitcoin-specific liquidations of $381 million in longs versus $111 million in shorts.

The ETF Bid: $21.46 Billion of Assets Gone Since May 15

The spot bid had been withdrawing for weeks. US spot bitcoin ETFs recorded 13 consecutive sessions of net outflows through June 3, totaling $4.37 billion since mid-May, CoinDesk reported, and Friday added a further $325.7 million. The clearest measure of the retreat is what happened to the funds themselves:

Bitcoin ETF assets under management fell from $104.29 billion on May 15 to $82.83 billion.
That is a $21.46 billion decline in about three weeks.
The funds' share of bitcoin's market capitalization slipped from above 7% to 6.36%.
On June 3 alone, ether ETFs lost $52.94 million, Solana ETFs $12.74 million and XRP ETFs $5.34 million.

The Positioning: A $55,000 Strike Now Within Reach

The derivatives market had been pricing this outcome before it arrived. In Thursday's session, total open interest fell 8.5% to $111.4 billion and bitcoin futures open interest dropped from more than 800,000 BTC to 766,000 BTC, according to CoinDesk, a pattern of positions being closed rather than replaced. On Deribit, the $60,000 put, a contract that pays out if bitcoin trades below that strike, carried more than $1 billion in notional open interest, and the $55,000 put was the most-traded contract on the board. Friday's low took the first of those strikes into the money and left the second as the nearest level the options market has priced with size. Whether the $55,000 positioning proves to be a hedge or a destination depends on something the past five sessions have not supplied: a return of spot demand large enough to absorb the selling, with the ETF complex still a net seller and no sign in Friday's flow data that the streak had ended.