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Bitcoin drops below $73K. IBIT sees $528M in outflows
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Escalation, outflows, and a few surprises on both ends of the market. This week reminded everyone how fast the mood can shift. Here’s what happened:
quick weekly news
Bitcoin drops below $73K as U.S. strikes on Iran trigger $1 billion in liquidations
Bitcoin broke below $73,000 for the first time in months on Thursday, touching $72,670 in Asian session hours before settling at $73,200, down 3.4% over 24 hours and 6.3% on the week. The trigger was a fresh round of U.S. airstrikes on an Iranian military site near the Strait of Hormuz, which unwound the ceasefire optimism that had been building through May.Source: goodcryptoX
The rest of the market followed. ETH fell 4.2% to $1,976, losing the $2,000 level and dropping 7.7% on the week. SOL shed 3.5%, XRP slid 3.6%, and DOGE lost 3.2%. HYPE was the only major holding a weekly gain, down 4.5% on the day but still up 2.4% over seven days, per goodcryptoX data.
The drop flushed leveraged traders hard. CoinGlass data shows $958.8M in total liquidations over 24 hours across 167,706 traders, with $897M coming from longs and just $61M from shorts. Bitcoin liquidations led at $386M, followed by ETH at $246M. The largest single wipeout was a $15.34M BTC position on Hyperliquid. A 93% long-skew on a near-billion-dollar flush tells you everything about how traders were positioned, leaning into a recovery that didn’t come.Source: Coinglass
On the geopolitical side, U.S. Central Command described the strikes as defensive, aimed at maintaining the ceasefire and protecting commercial shipping. Iran reportedly targeted the American airbase from which the strikes originated. Kuwait said it was intercepting hostile missiles and drones. Trump told a cabinet meeting the strait would stay open: “It’s international waters. The strait’s going to be open to everybody.”
Risk assets fell across the board. Asian shares dropped1.7%, S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures pointed lower, and oil climbed as the strikes clouded the outlook for a deal to reopen the strait. Bitcoin had held above $74,000 through weeks of Iranian headlines. Thursday’s session broke that floor in a single move.
BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF sees $528M in outflows
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust shed $527.84M on Wednesday, the second-largest single-day outflow since the fund launched in January 2024, per SoSoValue data. It missed the all-time record by about $500,000. IBIT’s biggest outflow on record remains the $528.3M pulled on January 30.Source: SoSoValue
The broader ETF complex had an ugly day alongside it. The 11 U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs lost a combined $733.43M on Wednesday, with Fidelity’s FBTC down $60.30M and Grayscale’s GBTC shedding $104.76M. The complex has now posted outflows for several consecutive sessions, with more than $2B withdrawn over the past two weeks.
The selling and the price drop fed each other. As Bitcoin broke below $73,000, ETF redemptions forced issuers to sell the underlying asset to settle exits, accelerating the move down.
The day before, a separate and notable event: a single investor sold $1.29B of IBIT shares in one dark-pool block trade. That’s a privately negotiated transaction that lets large players move size without tipping off the broader market. It wasn’t a net outflow on its own – buyers can step in to absorb the volume, and IBIT’s actual net redemptions on Tuesday came to $192.44M. But the two events back-to-back point to institutional players trimming Bitcoin exposure as the macro backdrop deteriorated.
The trend had already been shifting. ETF accumulation across the year had thinned to a net of around 4,500 BTC, and May flipped from the steady buying of March and April into distribution. Bitcoin has dropped from above $82,000 on May 6 to under $73,000 now. IBIT has weathered extended outflow streaks before without a permanent reversal, but whether this is tactical de-risking around Hormuz headlines or something deeper depends on what the macro picture looks like once the dust settles.
NEAR jumps another 15% as cross-chain activity picks up momentum
NEAR climbed 15% over 24 hours to $2.90, extending a rally that has doubled the token’s price over the past month. Source: goodcryptoX
The move is tied to the growing traction of NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain transaction system. The product lets users specify a desired outcome – say, swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana, while third-party solvers handle execution in the background. DefiLlama data shows NEAR Intents has processed more than $19B in cumulative volume and generated around $32M in fees, drawing renewed attention to the protocol after months of limited price action.
The rally got an extra push from BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, who described NEAR, HYPE, and ZEC as crypto’s “holy trinity” in a post on X, before adding there’s a “long way to go” in the rally. Institutional demand has been building alongside the retail momentum, the Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP listed in Europe has grown to roughly $40M in assets under management, pulling in $7M in a single week.
Investors are also watching a June network upgrade introducing dynamic resharding, designed to automatically split network shards as demand increases, a scalability improvement that could matter if usage keeps climbing.
NEAR remains well below its 2022 peak near $20, but the combination of real product traction, influential endorsements, and incoming infrastructure upgrades has given the token a narrative that’s been hard to ignore lately.
ZachXBT flags a $520K exploit on Polymarket’s Polygon infrastructure
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT flagged a suspected security breach at Polymarket on Thursday, with on-chain data pointing to over $520,000 drained from two smart contracts on the Polygon blockchain.
Polymarket’s developers responded on X, saying the team is aware of the reports and describing the incident as a private key compromise of an internal operations wallet, not a smart contract exploit or a breach of core infrastructure. User funds and market resolutions remain safe, they said. Polygon Labs CTO Mudit Gupta backed that up: “Polymarket contracts are safe. User funds are safe. Looks like their market initializer was compromised. No impact to the users or the contracts.”
Polymarket has not yet issued a statement from its main account. Further updates are expected as the investigation continues.
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