Prepared by Nay.

Last week

Events

• BTC Selloff: The year witnessed its largest one-day selloff, with $1 billion in BTC liquidations. The volatility surged but got quickly sold off.
• Two pieces of news that are used to explain the selloff are Levergrande filing for bankruptcy in the US (speculation about Tether exposure to its debt), and the report stating SpaceX sold off its BTC. More likely the selloff was caused by the market structure (low vol environment and built up leverage) and positioning, although the news could’ve been the trigger.
• ETH ETF News: Bloomberg reported that the SEC is likely on the verge of approving a futures ETH ETF.
• Grayscale vs. SEC: The court's decision on the Bitcoin ETF between Grayscale and the SEC has been postponed for the second time.
• Friend Tech Comeback: Friend tech secured funding from Paradigm and is so back.
• BNB Venus Liquidation: A $30 million liquidation was triggered for BNB Venus, with the next set for $30 million at a $211 level.

Majors

BTC has finally broken to the downside of the 28,700-31,500 range where it remained for 2 months after the pump due to the ETF news. Given that volatility was extremely suppressed in recent weeks, the breakout, as expected, was dramatic. Over $1B in Bitcoin was liquidated on Thursday.

BTC: -10.54% ETH: -8.45%

ETHBTC is up 2.45%. Unlike its fiat pairs, ETHBTC hasn't broken out of its range. On Thursday's selloff, it basically touched the low of the range (~0.0606) and then shot back up to the top (~0.0643) once Bloomberg dropped its ETF news.

I still like the ETHBTC short. At this levels it presents a solid risk-reward profile since we're right at the range's peak. I feel more comfortable being short at the top of the range on ETHBTC than on any USD pair. I think squeeze is not likely as relatively little volume cares about the BTC denominated chart.

OI flush

For BTC, a whopping $2 billion of Open Interest (OI), which accounts for 27%, vanished in just 6 hours. Following that, OI steadily decreased and only stabilized recently, reaching levels of mid-June before the ETF news.