Bitcoin Near $64K as $4.66B Liquidated, Anthropic Eyes $1T IPO, Axelar Loses $4.67M

Crypto News

The crypto derivatives market absorbed roughly $4.66 billion in leveraged liquidations over the past 24 hours, with long positions accounting for $2.43 billion and shorts $2.24 billion — a near-even split that underscores intensifying two-way volatility. Bitcoin and Ethereum remained the epicenter, while major altcoins including Solana, XRP and Dogecoin each saw more than $150 million in positions wiped out. On four-hour windows, short liquidations dominated at roughly 57%, signaling aggressive short-covering as prices rebounded. Bitcoin currently changes hands near $64,000. Thinly traded tokens such as BONK, PEPE and WIF also registered outsized liquidations, a reminder of how quickly leverage cascades in low-liquidity markets.

Crypto venture capital is rotating back toward infrastructure, concentrating fresh capital in real-world assets, payment rails and DeFi insurance rather than short-lived narrative plays. Nine disclosed funding rounds surfaced in the week to June 20, a modest count that reflects a selective, deal-by-deal posture. Payments fintech Flutterwave drew a strategic investment from Ripple at a $3.3 billion valuation, the only round with a confirmed figure, signaling deepening ties between blockchain firms and traditional cross-border stablecoin remittance networks. Coinbase Ventures appeared most frequently, spreading bets across insurance, wallets and infrastructure on the expectation that on-chain financial activity continues to expand.

Artificial-intelligence leader Anthropic is heading toward a landmark public listing valued near $1 trillion, but Washington politics now loom as the largest variable in its debut. The company collided with US export controls last week after the Commerce Department restricted access to its most advanced models for foreign nationals and overseas users. President Trump, who had labeled the firm a national security threat days earlier, softened his stance after CEO Dario Amodei responded quickly to the administration's concerns. With AI emerging as a rare cross-partisan issue ahead of November's midterms, lawmakers from both wings are scrutinizing the sector, leaving the IPO's reception unusually exposed to political sentiment.

A cross-chain security incident drained roughly $4.67 million in wrapped tokens through Axelar's bridge connection to Secret Network. On-chain analysis shows the attacker exploited an infinite-mint vulnerability in a modified CW20-ICS20 token contract, spinning up a single-validator chain and relaying IBC packets to mint arbitrary wrapped assets before withdrawing funds via the bridge. Axelar's emergency committee disabled the Secret and Secret-SNIP connections immediately after confirming the breach and is coordinating with exchanges and law enforcement. The team stressed the damage was confined to assets bridged to Secret and did not affect Axelar's core protocol or other connected chains, unlike a generalized atomic swap failure.

Governance turbulence is mounting at the Ethereum Foundation after co-executive director Xiaowei Wang stepped down on Thursday, following the earlier departure of fellow co-director Tomasz Stanczak. With both co-leads now gone, the foundation has lost at least eight senior figures in five months, raising fresh questions about its operational direction and stewardship of the network. Separately, on-chain data shows 18.375 million LINK — worth roughly $144.9 million — moved from a Chainlink non-circulating supply wallet to Binance, a transfer typically read as a potential precursor to selling or liquidity repositioning. The pace of personnel and treasury moves has kept large-cap holders on edge.

Institutional desks continued accumulating despite broad selling pressure. Cardone Capital, an asset manager overseeing about $5.3 billion, bought 282 BTC worth roughly $17.7 million during the dip, while Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF added more than $25 million in BTC over the week — both counter-trend bids against retail outflows. On the regulatory front, the European Union confirmed its revised anti-money-laundering regime takes effect July 10, 2027, requiring enhanced KYC checks on single transactions above €1,000 and banning anonymous accounts and privacy-coin services outright. Commercial cash payments will also be capped at €10,000, tightening the compliance perimeter for crypto-asset service providers across the bloc.

Taken together, these threads sketch a market caught between institutional conviction and fragile sentiment. COINOTAG's aggregate data frames the tension precisely: the Fear & Greed Index sits at 23, deep in Extreme Fear, even as Bitcoin dominance climbs to 69.9% and total crypto market capitalization holds near $1.83 trillion. That combination — capital crowding into Bitcoin while altcoins bleed and leverage unwinds — is characteristic of a defensive, late-cycle posture rather than a broad bear market capitulation. Counter-trend buying from Cardone Capital and Morgan Stanley, the venture rotation into real-world infrastructure, and tightening EU compliance all point to a market consolidating around durable, regulation-ready use cases rather than speculative excess.