It was a volatile week for the wider crypto markets, with bitcoin itself beginning trading in the $68,000 region on Monday before once again getting above the $70,000 threshold on Tuesday.

By Wednesday, bitcoin was closing daily candles around $72,000, and the price seemed to be sitting comfortably above the $70k level until Friday. Bulls made an attempt to push the price past the May 20th high of $72,320 shortly before the important non-farm payrolls (NFP) economic data release at 8:30 AM EST on Friday.

The NFP report came in higher than consensus estimates, with the median estimate among economists being 180k, while the actual number was “hot” at 272k payrolls — 50% higher than the median consensus. This relates to bitcoin and crypto price action because the Federal Reserve’s fiscal policy decisions regarding interest rate cuts are highly dependent on these economic data releases.

A better-than-expected jobs report does not give the Fed an incentive to cut rates faster (which is what the market was hoping for), and this generally has a negative correlation with equity and crypto prices. As such, traders bid the price up to $72,660 in the minute leading up to the NFP print, only to immediately slam it back down by $1,600 or 2% when the hotter print came out.

The price meandered above the $70k level for a few hours, but bears took control later in the afternoon, continuing to sell bitcoin off to an intra-day low of $68,600 — a drop of over $4,000 or 5.6% from peak to trough on Friday. Ultimately, the Friday session ended trading just below the $70k mark at $69,755, representing only a 2.5% gain on the week after being up 7% at the peak.

Excess Long Liquidations

Friday’s price movement caused the sixth most significant leveraged long liquidation event in the futures markets so far this year, with close to $361 million in long positions being wiped out during the NFP data release.

This was the most substantial liquidation event since the geopolitical drama in the Middle East back in mid-April.

ETF Flows Make New Records

We’ve been tracking ETF flows since the inception of this newsletter, and they have had their ups and downs over the past few months. This week found ETF flows comfortably on the bullish side, with the second-highest spot ETF flow reading coming in on Tuesday, where close to $900 million in spot ETF flows poured in — the highest reading since the $1.05 billion seen on March 11th.

The biggest inflows came from Fidelity’s FBTC fund, with $378.7 million on Tuesday, followed by BlackRock’s IBIT fund, which recorded $274.4 million in flows the same day. With these inflows, total net assets aggregated across all the spot ETFs stood at a record high of $62.56 billion as of June 4th, surpassing the previous record of $60.96 billion from March 12th.

Even with Friday’s pullback, net assets stood at $61.1 billion, still above the previous all-time high. As of the end of this week, we’ve had nineteen consecutive days of inflows, setting a new record as well!

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