By cryptoadmin The recovery in bitcoin stalled Tuesday even after Strategy (MSTR) bought more of the largest cryptocurrency following its end-May sale.
Bitcoin was recently trading near $62,600, little changed from Monday. This follows Sunday's 4% bounce, which briefly took prices above $64,000 on some exchanges, including Coinbase.
Strategy, the largest publicly listed bitcoin holder, said Monday it had bought 1,550 $BTC for $101 million, bringing its total stockpile to 845,256 coins. While that's about 48 times the 32 $BTC it sold in the final days of May, the purchase failed to stir the token's price.
$BTC's immobility isn't doing any good to the broader market either. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index has dropped 1.8% in 24 hours and the CoinDesk 80 Index is down 1.3%.
The mood clearly remains risk-averse, with investors lacking conviction to chase upside.
"Bitcoin's recent rebound shows 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 a lot of attention has been placed on Strategy's buying activity, the bigger 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 how much risk they're willing to take across all asset classes, including crypto," Reis-Faria said.
Derivatives positioning
- Total crypto futures volume slipped 1.3% to $190.7 billion in 24 hours while open interest held largely flat around $103 billion. Liquidations crashed 48% to $301 million, a sign that the most aggressive leverage has already been flushed from the system.
- ZEC is the standout in futures markets. Open interest has climbed roughly 5% to 2.47 million tokens, the highest since May 26, as the token trades at $472, sharply recovering from lows under $300 last week.
- Its 24-hour cumulative volume delta (CVD) is positive, meaning buyers are driving price action with market orders rather than passive limit orders. The catch is that annualized perpetual funding rates remain deeply negative at around -45%, meaning shorts are still firmly in control of positioning. That sets up a potential short squeeze should prices continue rising, as bears face mounting costs to hold their positions.
- Open interest in WLD remains just shy of last week's record 963.6 million tokens, signaling elevated positioning and heightened potential for price volatility. Bitcoin and ether open interest are steady near Monday levels.
- The 24-hour CVD for most major coins, including bitcoin and ether, is negative, meaning bears are leading price action across the broader market.
- BVIV and EVIV — bitcoin and ether's 30-day implied volatility indexes — continue their retreats from Friday's highs, suggesting panic is ebbing. But front-week implied volatility in both is sharply elevated, pointing to 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 expiries in the past 24 hours. The one-week risk reversal is heavily skewed toward puts, with $BTC puts trading at an 8 vol point premium to calls, a persistent signal that fears of a deeper price selloff have not gone away.
Token talk
- Humanity Protocol's H token crashed more than 80% after attackers stole the private keys — the secret codes that control crypto wallets — of a Humanity Foundation member and drained more than $32 million from about 17 wallets, with losses still climbing.
- The token fell from about $0.67 to near $0.13 and briefly touched $0.05, a 24-hour drop of roughly 90%.
- The theft is still in progress. The attacker has been selling the stolen H for ether and minted another 100 million H, worth about $11 million, on BNB Chain, pointing to more selling pressure ahead.
- Humanity, a palm-scan identity project that pitches itself as a rival to , told users to stop touching its bridge and liquidity pools while it works with security firms and exchanges.
- The attack fits the dominant 2026 pattern 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 roughly $292 million the same month through a single-validator bridge.
- Sahara AI's $SAHARA fell about 60% to roughly $0.016, near its all-time low of $0.01355. About $215 million changed hands against a market cap near $49 million, turnover more than four times the token's size 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 posted verbatim on Nov. 29, 2025, when the token fell from about 7 cents to 4 cents. It blamed a pre-scheduled 600 million token transfer to its Chainlink cross-chain bridge and said team and investor allocations are untouched on-chain.
- $SAHARA is now down roughly 75% since its June 2025 debut.