Live markets: Bitcoin plunges under $59,000 as early bounce fades
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- Bitcoin dropped to $59,175 overnight, its lowest since early June, before recovering to roughly $61,500 by Thursday morning, and has now lost about 10% since Monday's peak near $65,500.
- Crypto futures saw nearly $1 billion in liquidations across bitcoin, ether, solana, and tokenized stocks including Micron (MU) and Sandisk (SNDK), with roughly $430 million of that hitting bitcoin long positions.
- Wintermute had flagged $59,000 as the bear-market low to watch in its Tuesday note, and that level held — but $1.6 billion in leveraged longs sit clustered below $58,000, per CoinGlass, where a break would accelerate the drop.
- Micron reported quarterly earnings after the close that shattered analyst estimates, lifting the broader memory chip complex and providing the bounce for crypto, while SK Hynix separately disclosed plans for a roughly $29 billion U.S. stock listing — one of the largest offerings ever — sending Samsung and Kioxia higher in Asia.
- Bitcoin's slide was driven by a hawkish Fed, six straight weeks of ETF outflows, thinning summer liquidity, and a June 30 quarter-end options expiry traders say is keeping markets unstable, with no single catalyst behind the move.
- Thursday's PCE inflation print — the Fed's preferred price gauge — is the next data point that could move the market in either direction.
Why it matters: Wintermute's $59,000 floor held, but $1.6 billion in leveraged longs clustered below $58,000 means a break there would cascade liquidations and accelerate the drop, while Thursday's PCE print is the immediate macro trigger. The irony: the same AI chip trade that crashed the Kospi 10% on Monday on fears the spending boom was stalling is now steadying crypto via Micron's beat — confirming AI memory demand reads as structural, not speculative.
