Bitcoin Tests $59K as ETFs Shed $692M, Options Expiry Looms

Bitcoin dipped below $59,000 Friday morning, dragged down by a fresh wave of ETF selling just as one of the year’s biggest options expiries comes due.

The largest cryptocurrency was trading around $59,100 on Friday, down 6.4% over the past week and roughly 53% below the record $126,080 it set in October. It changed hands in a 24-hour range of $58,189 to $60,724, leaving its market cap near $1.18 trillion.

On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt‘s parent company Dastan, traders expect Bitcoin’s next move to take it to $55,000, placing a 77% chance on that outcome, up from 72% at the start of the week.

The slide came as U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs bled some $691 million on Thursday, their largest single-day outflow since May 27, according to Farside Investors data. The weakness runs deeper than one session. Annual growth in U.S. ETF Bitcoin holdings has slumped to “basically zero” for the first time since the funds launched in 2024, with the ETFs now adding to Bitcoin’s supply rather than soaking it up, CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno told Milk Road Wednesday. For a bottom to form, he said, that buying needs to stop shrinking and start accelerating again.

The selling sets an uneasy stage for Friday, when about $10.6 billion in Bitcoin options expire on Deribit, the year’s largest quarterly settlement. With Bitcoin trading far below the roughly $72,000 “max pain” level, some 80% of those contracts are on track to expire worthless. The $60,000 mark “remains the definitive line in the sand,” said Mike McCluskey, co-founder of tokenization platform tx. Given heavy put positioning at that strike, he said, a successful defense “would confirm that dip buyers maintain control,” while a breach would “likely accelerate the downside in this thin liquidity environment.”

The pressure has already torched leveraged traders. Over $1.1 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours as the drop caught bullish bets offside, $875 million of which were longs, according to CoinGlass.

Behind the slide is a tighter macro backdrop. Bitcoin has weakened since new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish debut, with traders bracing for higher-for-longer rates. The drop briefly took BTC to its lowest level since September 2024 this week, dipping below its 200-week moving average—a level that has “historically served as a critical psychological and technical floor,” according to McCluskey.

In a Thursday AMA, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said Bitcoin’s bull case “revolves on two things,” the passage of the Clarity Act, and a Fed rate cut. The war in Iran “has slowed the cutting cycle down,” he said, adding that “When we see the war end and oil prices go back to $60 then you’ll start to see this idea of, maybe that opens the door for a late fourth quarter rate cut, or even early first quarter rate cut the next year.” Until a fresh spark arrives, he sees Bitcoin range-bound, waiting on “some new story” to climb higher.