Recovery in bitcoin stalled on Tuesday, even after Strategy (MSTR) bought more of the largest cryptocurrency following the sell-off at the end of May.
Bitcoin recently traded 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 traded bitcoin holder, said on Monday that it had bought 1,550 BTC for $101 million, bringing its total holdings to 845,256 coins. Although that’s about 48 times the 32 BTC it sold in the final days of May, the purchase failed to touch the token’s price.
BTC’s immobility doesn’t bode well for the broader market either. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index is down 1.8% in 24 hours, and the CoinDesk 80 Index is down 1.3%.
Sentiment remains clearly risk-on, with investors lacking conviction to chase upside.
“Bitcoin’s recent rally shows that there is still demand as prices pull back, but investors are not committing capital with the same level of confidence that we saw earlier this year,” Daniel Reis-Faria, CEO of ZeroStack, said in an email.
“While much attention has been paid to 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 are willing to take across all asset classes, including crypto,” says Reis-Faria.
Derivatives positioning
- Total crypto futures volume fell 1.3% to $190.7 billion in 24 hours, while open interest remained largely unchanged around $103 billion. Liquidations plunged 48% to $301 million, a sign that the most aggressive leverage has already been flushed out of the system.
- ZEC is unique in the futures markets. Open interest has increased by approx. 5% to 2.47 million tokens, the highest since May 26, when the token traded at $472, and has recovered strongly from lows below $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 still have firm control over positioning. That creates potential short pressure if prices continue to rise as carriers face rising costs to hold their positions.
- Open interest in WLD is still just shy of last week’s record high of 963.6 million tokens, signaling elevated positioning and increased potential for price volatility. Bitcoin and ether open interest is 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 indices – continue their retreat 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 US CPI release.
- On Deribit, the $60,000 put remains a focal point and is among the most actively traded strikes across multiple expirations in the past 24 hours. One-week risk reversal is heavily skewed against puts, with BTC 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 by more than 80% after attackers stole the private keys — the secret codes that control crypto wallets — from a Humanity Foundation member and drained more than $32 million from around 17 wallets, with losses still mounting.
- The token fell from around $0.67 to close to $0.13 and briefly touched $0.05, a 24-hour drop of around 90%.
- The theft is still ongoing. The attacker has sold the stolen H for ether and minted another 100 million H, worth around $11 million, on the BNB Chain, pointing to more selling pressure ahead.
- Humanity, a palm-scan identity project pitching 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 instead of code. Solana’s Drift lost about $285 million in April after attackers seized an administrative key, and Kelp DAO lost about $292 million the same month through a single-validator bridge.
- Sahara AI’s SAHARA fell about 60% to about $0.016, near its all-time low of $0.01355. About $215 million changed hands for a market cap near $49 million, turnover more than four times the size of the token 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 November 29, 2025, when the token fell from around 7 cents to 4 cents. It blamed a pre-planned 600 million token transfer to its Chainlink cross-chain bridge and said team and investor allocations are untouched on the chain.
- SAHARA is now down about 75% since its June 2025 debut.
