Bitcoin ETFs Lose $648M as Strive Stacks 382 BTC, HRF Debuts Nonprofit Playbook

Bitcoin News

US spot Bitcoin ETFs surrendered another $648.64 million on Monday, extending last week's roughly $1 billion in redemptions and underscoring how quickly institutional positioning has cooled. BlackRock's IBIT carried the bulk of the damage with $448 million in net withdrawals, followed by the ARK 21Shares product at $110 million and Fidelity's spot fund at $63 million. The sell-down arrived as Bitcoin slipped 6.7% from $81,700 last Thursday to a weekly low of $76,201, with the asset now changing hands near $76,680. Sentiment has cracked alongside price, with the Crypto Fear and Greed Index falling to 25 and re-entering Extreme Fear territory.

Despite the visible bleed from ETF wrappers, on-chain data shows long-term Bitcoin holders have spent months adding to balances rather than distributing into strength. Analysts at blockchain infrastructure firm Wefi argue this steady accumulation is what continues to limit downside potential, dampening the kind of cascading liquidation events that typically accompany 7% drawdowns. Perpetual futures funding rates also flipped positive over the weekend after a multi-month negative streak, suggesting traders are tentatively rebuilding leveraged long exposure even as spot prices remain pinned. The divergence between flow-driven selling and behavioural accumulation has become the defining tension of the current market cycle.

Strive, Inc., the Vivek Ramaswamy–founded asset manager and digital asset treasury company, disclosed the acquisition of another 382 BTC for roughly $30 million. Chief Executive Matt Cole confirmed the buy was executed at an average price of approximately $79,348 per coin, lifting the Nasdaq-listed firm's stack to 15,391 BTC valued at nearly $1.2 billion at prevailing market quotes. The fresh purchase keeps Strive seated as the ninth-largest publicly disclosed corporate holder, slotted between bitcoin miner Hut 8 and Riot Platforms. The transaction also illustrates how corporate buyers continue absorbing supply through the drawdown rather than retreating to sidelined cash positions.

The funding architecture behind Strive's accumulation mirrors a playbook that Michael Saylor's Strategy popularised against the asset's fixed circulating supply. Strive previously raised about $160 million through a Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, designed to maintain a strike between $99 and $100 while paying variable monthly dividends, then followed with an upsized $225 million follow-on offering earlier this year. The company brands itself as the first publicly traded asset management bitcoin treasury company and absorbed Semler Scientific in an all-stock transaction last year. Each tranche of equity-linked paper effectively converts traditional capital markets liquidity into hard-coded BTC reserves on the corporate balance sheet.

The Human Rights Foundation's Freedom Tech program released a detailed playbook titled Bitcoin for Nonprofits, aimed at civil society organisations operating under hostile financial regimes. The document positions Bitcoin not as a speculative asset but as parallel financial infrastructure for groups facing frozen accounts, blocked wires, and weaponised compliance reviews. It walks operators through hot-wallet and cold storage configurations, recovery-phrase safeguards, and 2-of-3 or 3-of-5 multisignature treasury setups. The guide explicitly steers nonprofits away from custodial exchanges, arguing that self-custody is the only durable defence when the threat model includes the local jurisdiction itself or its banking partners.

Macro positioning continues to weigh on the broader risk complex, with traders attributing this week's de-risking to last week's hotter inflation print and rising odds of a Federal Reserve rate hike before year-end. Prediction-market pricing places the probability of a 25 basis-point cut in June at just 2%, while the chance of a deeper cut before July sits near 4%. Renewed tensions across the US-Iran corridor compounded the move, fuelling concerns that geopolitical shocks could trigger fresh liquidity squeezes and tip the tape toward a bear market. The combined macro and geopolitical inputs explain why fund managers chose to lighten Bitcoin exposure even as long-term holder cohorts kept stacking.

Bitcoin trades at $76,784 with a market capitalisation of roughly $1.54 trillion and 24-hour turnover near $17.4 billion, registering a marginal 0.13% daily decline. The chart sits inside an uneasy sideways regime, with immediate support stacked at $76,056, $74,561 and $72,673, while resistance steps up through $77,729, $79,054 and $80,507. An RSI reading of 43.8 sits below the midline without yet flagging oversold conditions, and the MACD remains in bearish alignment. Reclaiming $79,054 on rising volume would invalidate the near-term bearish thesis; conversely, a daily close beneath $74,561 would open the door toward the $72,673 shelf.