Bitcoin Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have suffered nearly $5.75 billion in outflows since mid-May, fueling speculation that institutional investors are cashing in on crypto to prepare for the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO.
The selling pressure drove bitcoin to a 2026 low below $60,000 in the first week of June, more than 50% below its all-time high of nearly $125,000 last October. One of the prevailing narratives of the selloff is a rotation of capital away from cryptocurrency to prepare for a series of highly anticipated initial public offerings (IPOs), starting with SpaceX (SPCX) on Friday.
Fabian Dori, chief investment officer at Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum, is not convinced.
“The ETF outflow is real,” Dori said in an interview with CoinDesk. “But the data doesn’t really support the hypothesis that bitcoin would bleed because of the SpaceX IPO.”
If investors systematically sold bitcoin to raise cash for IPO allocations, currency balance sheets would likely show unusual patterns of outflows, and the market value of stablecoins would likely decline as capital left the crypto ecosystem, he argues. Neither seems to be happening.
Currency flows remain largely normal, while stablecoin supply has seen little meaningful contraction. More speculative corners of the digital asset market also continue to attract capital. Products tied to higher-risk cryptoassets are still gathering inflows, something Dori says would be unlikely if investors abandoned the asset class entirely.
Perhaps the strongest argument against the IPO rotation theory comes from the derivatives markets.
Dori pointed to a decline in CME bitcoin futures open interest that has coincided with ETF redemptions. This relationship suggests that a significant portion of the outflow may be linked to the settlement of cash-and-carry arbitrage trades rather than investors reallocating to equity offerings.
A cash-and-carry trade is a popular institutional arbitrage strategy that seeks to take advantage of the gap between bitcoin’s spot price and futures prices. Investors buy spot bitcoin, often through an ETF, while also selling bitcoin futures contracts. As long as futures trade at a premium to spot prices, the investor can obtain a relatively low risk-reward when the contracts converge at expiration.
When this premium narrows or financing terms become less attractive, traders liquidate the position by selling their spot exposure and closing their future shorts. This process can generate ETF outflows even when investors don’t turn bearish on bitcoin itself. Instead, the arbitrage opportunity has simply become less profitable.
“Open rates and funding rates moved very positively together over the same period,” Dori said. “It suggests that a significant portion of ETF flows are associated with the settlement of funding-rate carry-trade arbitrage.”
Read more: It’s not just bitcoin ETFs. Corporate BTC purchases have also dried up
