Bitcoin Holds $63K Amid $1.72B ETF Outflows as Bybit Targets SpaceX Tokenized IPO

Crypto News

The UK's Labour Party has formally pressed Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to explain a £5 million ($6.7 million) undisclosed personal gift from Tether billionaire Christopher Harborne, with party chair Anna Turley accusing him of "evading reasonable scrutiny" and shifting his account of events. Harborne, who holds a 12% stake in the Tether stablecoin issuer and ranks as Britain's sixth-richest person with a $24.4 billion fortune, made the payment in 2024 shortly before Farage reversed his decision not to contest the general election. After winning Clacton, Reform became Britain's best-funded party, helped by £7 million from Harborne and BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo. The parliamentary standards commissioner has opened a formal inquiry.

Bybit, the second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has entered the tokenization race with its new IPO Express service, aiming to capture retail demand for SpaceX's $75 billion public listing on June 12. The Dubai-based platform becomes the second exchange after Kraken's parent Payward to offer tokenized initial public offerings, letting eligible users worldwide buy shares at official underwritten prices rather than competing in secondary markets. Powered by xStocks regulated infrastructure built on a blockchain, the product offers extended trading hours, crypto-native settlement and DeFi composability. SpaceX registration runs June 7 to 11, with allocation on June 11 and 12 ahead of spot trading.

Bitcoin has clawed back above $63,000, but exchange-traded fund flows signal caution beneath the bounce. As the price slid toward $60,000, the 11 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $1.72 billion in net outflows last week, marking a third straight week of accelerating redemptions. Crucially, those withdrawals occurred on weekly volume of just $18.43 million. By contrast, a similar drop to $60,000 in early February produced only $318 million in outflows against $46.15 billion in volume, a clear capitulation. The latest combination points to a steady exodus rather than a shock-driven bottom, leaving the recovery's durability in question.

Industry voices argue that stablecoins cannot scale into institutional payment rails without confidentiality. While networks have proven they settle value faster and cheaper than legacy systems, public transaction visibility remains a structural barrier for banks, treasuries, payroll teams and corporate finance departments that routinely shield counterparties, amounts and timing from outside observers. Traditional rails such as SWIFT, Fedwire and ACH already operate on selective visibility, exposing details only to authorized parties, auditors and regulators. Open blockchains, by design, broadcast commercially sensitive data to every observer permanently. Proponents contend that confidential yet auditable payment flows are the missing requirement before serious volume from payroll, merchant settlement and treasury operations can move on-chain.

Privacy-focused altcoin Zcash staged a sharp recovery, rebounding roughly 45% to recoup much of the prior week's losses. The token had plunged after Shielded Labs disclosed a bug in the component responsible for concealing transaction details, raising concerns over the network's core privacy guarantees. Sentiment reversed as developers floated a new upgrade dubbed "Ironwood," reassuring holders that the shielded protocol would be hardened. The episode underscores how quickly confidence in privacy infrastructure can swing on technical disclosures, and how proposed fixes can drive outsized price moves in assets whose entire value proposition rests on cryptographic confidentiality.

Macro signals added to the cautious tone. Gold slipped below its 200-day moving average for the first time since October 2003, a development often read as fading long-term momentum that some bulls hope could redirect capital toward Bitcoin. Geopolitical risk resurfaced as Israel and Iran traded strikes for the first time since a U.S.-brokered ceasefire two months ago, threatening renewed regional conflict. Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury yields rose as traders braced for May inflation data expected to show the cost of living climbing above 4%. Looming mega-listings from SpaceX and Anthropic, two of the largest IPOs in history, threaten to drain liquidity from broader markets.

The week's threads converge on a single tension: liquidity is being pulled in competing directions just as crypto's recovery looks fragile. Record-scale IPOs and rising yields are siphoning capital toward traditional markets, while exchanges race to tokenize those same listings and pull retail flows back on-chain. Regulatory and political scrutiny of crypto wealth, from Westminster's Tether-linked donations probe to demands for confidential institutional payments, signals an asset class maturing into mainstream finance and its accountability. With ETF demand thinning, geopolitical risk flaring and inflation pressing higher, the dominant narrative is one of capital rotation under tightening conditions rather than unbridled risk appetite.