Bitcoin Closes July at $64,131 After the Smallest ETF Month on Record

Bitcoin closed July at $64,131.17, capping the best broad-market month in a year after starting it at the cycle low. The CoinDesk 20 Index, which tracks the largest digital assets by market value, gained 8.7% over the month, its biggest advance since July 2025. Bitcoin's own monthly move is reported two ways and the sources differ: CoinDesk puts it at roughly 7.5%, while CryptoRank's recap puts it at 9.2% measured off an open near $58,000. Measured against June's $58,503.73 close, the arithmetic gives 9.6%. The final session was red, with bitcoin trading below $63,000 intraday, down about 3% on the day, and ether at $1,890, off 1.40%.

The Low: $57,735 on the First of the Month

July opened at the bottom. Bitcoin printed an intraday low of $57,735 on July 1, a figure CoinDesk has repeatedly logged as $57,750 instead, before recovering to an intraday high of $60,475 and finishing roughly 3% higher over 24 hours. A surge of spot buying around 8:50 a.m. EST drove the break back above $60,000, lifting bitcoin's standalone market value above $1.2 trillion and the total crypto market to $2.15 trillion, up 2.4%, with altcoins posting gains above 7%. That low was the floor under a first half in which bitcoin fell about 30%, and it came directly out of the capitulation that closed out June.

The ETF Picture: $273M Described as Statistical Noise

Spot bitcoin funds turned buyers again, but in amounts small enough that CoinDesk called the return "statistical noise rather than a structural shift." They drew $273 million across two weeks, $75.67 million in the week ended July 10 and $197.40 million in the week ended July 17, barely more than the $226.84 million of the smallest single week in the eight-week, $8 billion-plus outflow streak that preceded it. Bitcoin traded at $64,057.64 on July 20, inside a $64,000 to $65,000 band and still far below the peak above $126,000 set in October 2025. The month-end tallies do not agree with one another:

Spot bitcoin ETFs: $172.4 million net for July per Cointelegraph, the first monthly inflow since April, against CoinDesk's running figure of $205 million with two sessions left.
Ether ETFs: $365.2 million per Cointelegraph, $342.85 million per CoinDesk on July 30, across four consecutive positive weeks.
Week ended July 31: an outflow of $61.53 million, including a $265.4 million single day, the largest since July 13.
Bitcoin ETFs year to date: minus $5.3 billion, against $51.32 billion cumulative since the January 2024 launch and $76.29 billion in net assets.

Ether in Front: A Better Month Than Bitcoin

Ether led the recovery rather than followed it. On July 16 it traded at $1,920, up 2.2% on the day and 11% on the week, against bitcoin's $64,600, down 0.3% on the day and up 4.2% on the week. Ether funds took $96 million over the first three days of that week and almost all of it was BlackRock's: ETHA drew $45.3 million on the Wednesday, ETHB $4 million, and the other eight products under $5 million between them. Grayscale's ether trust has bled $5.3 billion since launch. One outlet, AMBCrypto, put ether's full-month gain at 20.3%; no second source carried the figure.

What Carries Forward: Static Open Interest and Thin Participation

Total crypto market value ended the month at $2.27 trillion, up 1.45%, on 24-hour spot volume of $16.57 billion, up 51.4%. Bitcoin dominance, its share of total crypto market value, was 56.18% per CryptoRank and 56.3% per TradingView Hub, with ether at 10.11%. Breadth was ordinary for a month described as the best in a year: 55% of the top 100 altcoins finished positive, with an average return of 5.1% and a median of 0.8%, real-world assets, GameFi and restaking leading while memecoins, layer-2s, DePIN and AI tokens lagged. About $10 billion of bitcoin and ether options expired on the final day, BVIV, a gauge of expected bitcoin volatility, sat at 37%, its lowest since May, and bitcoin open interest was roughly 750,000 BTC, static all month. The recovery from $57,735 arrived with no new leverage behind it and with the largest corporate holder stepping back from the market, leaving the question of who buys next unanswered.