Bitcoin fell below $76,000 on Wednesday afternoon in New York, trading at $75,820 after a brief slip to $75,423 in the morning. The session marks the seventh straight day of net outflows from spot bitcoin ETFs and pushes the cryptocurrency more than nine per cent below the $82,000 high it briefly tagged at the start of May.
The proximate driver has been the lack of progress on the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, which has kept oil volatile, weighed on broader risk-asset sentiment and pulled flows back into the dollar. Bitcoin's correlation with the Nasdaq 100, which had fallen below 0.4 earlier in the year, is back above 0.6 on a thirty-day rolling basis and tracks the broader risk-off shading that has come through into US equities since last Thursday.
Spot bitcoin ETF flows have been the cleanest signal. BlackRock's IBIT, the largest fund, has shed roughly $1.9 billion across the seven-day stretch, with Fidelity's FBTC and ARK's ARKB each shedding more than $400 million. A single dark-pool block trade on Tuesday afternoon, sized at roughly $1.3 billion, accounted for the bulk of the daily outflow and pushed bitcoin briefly below $76,000 before the New York close.
Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, has compounded the bearish tape. The treasury-bitcoin company paused its aggressive purchase programme this month to focus on reducing its convertible-debt stack, executive chairman Michael Saylor told investors on a Tuesday call, and said no further bitcoin purchases were planned in the second quarter. Strategy's common stock has fallen roughly twenty-one per cent month-to-date, underperforming bitcoin by about twelve percentage points.
Ethereum has held up better than bitcoin, down only 3.4 per cent on the week against bitcoin's 6.1 per cent, helped by continued positive flows into the spot ether ETFs and by the strong May launch of the EigenLayer mainnet. Solana, in contrast, has been the biggest underperformer in the top ten, down nine per cent on the week and now trading below the level at which it began the year.
Analysts at JPMorgan and Standard Chartered remain constructive on the medium-term path, with both still targeting roughly $120,000 by year-end on the back of a Fed easing cycle and continued ETF inflow recovery once the Iran framework is signed. But near-term the technical picture has weakened: bitcoin closed Wednesday below its 50-day moving average for the fifth straight session.