Bitcoin Hovers at $67K After 9.5% Weekly Slide, $1.7B Liquidated as Ethena Jumps 20%

Bitcoin News

Bitcoin steadied near $67,000 on Wednesday with a modest 0.7% bounce that did little to disguise a brutal 9.5% drawdown over the prior seven sessions. The largest cryptocurrency now sits squarely inside the consolidation band it traded within between February and April, following a failed breakout attempt above $81,000 last month. A breach below $60,000 would risk triggering cascade liquidations toward the $54,000 region, a level that has acted as structural support dating back to 2021 and reaffirmed again through 2024. The divergence with U.S. equities — which printed fresh record highs on Tuesday — has unsettled crypto investors who long viewed the historical correlation between the two risk asset classes as load-bearing.

Derivatives positioning underwent a violent reset over the past 24 hours, with more than $1.7 billion in leveraged crypto futures bets wiped out — roughly double the prior day's tally. The overwhelming majority of forced closures hit bullish long positions after Bitcoin briefly slipped to $65,500 during the session. Aggregate 24-hour trading volume jumped 27% to roughly $300 million, while industry-wide notional open interest contracted just over 2%, a combination that signals aggressive deleveraging of crowded longs rather than fresh shorting pressure. The flush leaves speculative positioning notably lighter, a structural condition that historically precedes either a sharper relief rally or a deeper capitulation phase before bottoming.

Ethena's native ENA token rocketed more than 20% in 24 hours after Coinbase confirmed plans to integrate elements of the synthetic dollar platform into a new yield-bearing savings product targeting its 100 million-plus user base. The move grants Ethena unprecedented retail distribution at scale and validates the protocol's USDe design inside a regulated exchange perimeter. The rally bucked the broader risk-off tone gripping digital assets and pushed the Altcoin Season indicator to 53 out of 100, its highest reading since early March. The deal underscores how major exchanges are racing to embed on-chain yield primitives directly into mainstream consumer banking experiences.

On-chain data showed crypto whales splitting sharply during the selloff, with one of the more aggressive accumulation flows pointing toward Maple Finance's SYRUP token. Whale-cohort holdings surged roughly 220% in 24 hours, lifting their balance to approximately 1.68 million tokens, equivalent to about $180,000 in fresh buying. The top 100 mega-whale addresses added a further 0.97%, equivalent to nearly 11 million tokens or $1.7 million in capital. The accumulation aligns with Maple's expanding institutional credit footprint inside DeFi — total value locked sits near $3.9 billion, up roughly 21% from late April, while syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT continue generating real yields of 4.7% and 4.1% respectively.

Artificial-intelligence-linked crypto tokens stood out as the session's clearest pocket of strength, with NEAR, Render and Fetch.ai each climbing roughly 9% even as broader majors merely stabilized after Tuesday's market-wide flush. The rotation suggests speculative capital is migrating toward narratives perceived as carrying durable secular catalysts, even while macro-sensitive assets digest the Bitcoin drawdown. Not every momentum trade held its gains, however: Humanity Protocol's H token shed roughly a quarter of its value in 24 hours after a 200% weekly rally, a sharp reminder that altcoin upside remains uneven and prone to reflexive profit-taking once short-term holders capture quick gains in low-float assets.

Standard Chartered's digital assets research desk argued this week that Strategy's disclosure of a 32 BTC sale during the final week of May — its first reported reduction — could mark the inflection point for Ethereum outperformance against Bitcoin. While the divestment represents a negligible slice of Strategy's 843,706 BTC stack, the symbolic value of any forced reduction matters: bitcoin treasury vehicles lack the staking yield that allows Ethereum treasury firms to hold indefinitely. Analyst Geoffrey Kendrick projected the ETH-BTC ratio rising to 0.040 by year-end from roughly 0.028 today, reiterating long-term ETH targets of $4,000 by end-2026 and $40,000 by end-2030 anchored to stablecoin and tokenization growth.

Bitcoin's spot tape at $67,288 sits uncomfortably between immediate resistance at $68,024 and first support at $66,783, with the $65,426 line marking the next defensive zone before a deeper test of $63,845. The RSI reading of 24.22 places price firmly in oversold territory, historically a setup that precedes mean-reversion bounces, yet the bearish MACD configuration and confirmed downtrend warn against premature long entries on each daily candlestick. A reclaim of $70,197 would invalidate the bearish thesis and open a path toward $72,733. Conversely, a daily close beneath $63,845 would expose the $60,000 psychological line and risk activating the cascade liquidations flagged across derivatives data, deepening the broader bear market tilt.