Bitcoin Fundamental Briefing, June 2025

WICKED GAME

…indeed. This month market is hungry for real big, breakthrough news, some epic shifts on BTC. Everybody were waiting for adoption of a new stablecoins bill, So its passed but whats next? At the same time, this month was so representative in terms of manipulations. It clearly has become a hostage of D. Trump geopolitical games and in fact now stands as a pocket market. What’s the investors confidence now, whats the degree of trust, if the 1st man of the country falls down to just full his pockets, using geopolitics and manipulating domestic markets…. Every more or less solid action on BTC this month was triggered by Donny’s tweets.

MARKET OVERVIEW

Bitcoin slid below $100,000 for the first time since May and Ether sank sharply after President Donald Trump said US bombers attacked Iran’s three main nuclear sites, triggering risk aversion in weekend trading in digital-asset markets.

The latest losses come after Trump said the Iranian sites of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were struck in the operation, specifically describing a “payload of BOMBS” dropped on Fordow, a key location of uranium enrichment that has raised international concern that Iran was preparing to create a nuclear weapon.

Total liquidation of crypto bets over the last 24 hours was more than $1 billion, with about $915 million and $109 million in long and short positions closed respectively, according to data compiled by Coinglass.

“Markets are nervously eying ongoing geopolitical developments,” said Caroline Mauron, co-founder of Orbit Markets, a provider of liquidity for crypto derivatives. The focus of markets will be largely on oil when traditional markets reopen, she said.

“The overhang of whether the US would strike Iran caused a sell-off through the week and into the weekend,” said Cosmo Jiang, general partner at Pantera Capital Management.

The number of transactions settled on the Bitcoin network has dipped this year to around 500,000 a day, from between 600,000 to 700,000 in 2024, the report said. At the same time, monetary amounts settled have remained strong, with more than $7 billion worth of the cryptocurrency being transferred every day this year.

“Obviously there’s the institutional factor where as more and more institutions are coming in, we’re seeing larger sizes being traded and a lot of appetite from all types of institutions from family offices to asset managers to pension funds to sovereign wealth fund,” said George Mandres, senior volatility and derivatives trader at XBTO Trading LLC. “In general, a lot of new retail traders will probably just buy the ETF as opposed to buying Bitcoin on exchanges.”

So while the number of transactions have reduced, the amounts of each completed trade on the network have increased, suggesting that the fewer active traders are moving larger amounts when they make transactions.

“When we look in terms of the on-chain data on the Bitcoin blockchain as opposed to in financial markets, so we we’re seeing more use of Bitcoin as a store of value rather than a medium of exchange,” said Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale Investments. “And if Bitcoin is going to be digital gold in the longer run, this may actually continue.”

Still Assets held in crypto funds hit a record high in May as easing trade tensions lifted risk appetite and some investors used the digital currencies to hedge against market volatility and diversify from their U.S. holdings.

Morningstar data on 294 crypto funds shows they attracted $7.05 billion in net inflows last month, the highest since December, bringing total assets under management to a record $167 billion.

“The greenback is projected to keep plummeting, bond yields are rising, there’s uncertainty about the equity markets. But bitcoin seems to be holding strong.”

International markets appear to have convinced themselves that the latest conflagration in the Middle East can be looked through as easily as all the region’s other flare-ups of the last decade.  Gold prices fell, Treasury yields rose, and equity volatility dropped Monday as Israel and Iran continue to pound each other with bombs and missiles. Most startlingly, stocks rebounded; relative to long bonds, they are their strongest since the day after President Donald Trump’s inaugural.

Bitcoin options show traders are hedging against a price pullback to the $100,000 price level with geopolitical and economic uncertainty lingering over global financial markets.

The put-to-call volume ratio on the crypto derivatives exchange Deribit surged to 2.17 over the past 24 hours, reflecting a strong tilt toward protective bets. 

The caution comes as Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged and continued to predict two rate cuts in 2025, citing high uncertainty over the economic outlook that has diminished. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said he expects a meaningful amount of inflation in coming months.

STABLECOIN “GENIUS ACT” BILL

The passage of stablecoin legislation in the US Senate marks a huge leap forward for the potential mainstreaming of cryptocurrencies that track the US dollar one-to-one. Yet there are still big problems to solve before many businesses can capitalize on the opportunities that are arising. Now, stablecoins are taking the leap from their original use as crypto-market poker chips to common mediums of exchange, offering merchants and consumers cheaper and more efficient payments systems.

If signed into law, the stablecoin bill would require tokens to be backed by liquid assets – such as U.S. dollars and short-term Treasury bills – and for issuers to publicly disclose the composition of their reserves on a monthly basis.

Stablecoins must always be exchangeable at par (1:1 to the dollar), but cannot earn interest like deposits or money market funds.

“As with any new form of value, widespread adoption necessitates regulatory clarity, consistent legal frameworks across jurisdictions and – importantly – interoperability with existing infrastructure and assets,” said Tom Zscach, chief innovation officer at Swift, the global bank-messaging cooperative. “Without this last point, new assets just risk creating additional fragmentation in an already complex financial ecosystem.”

For merchants and other businesses, the advantages of using the tokens could be significant: lower transaction costs, faster payments and 24/7 availability.

It all could lead to an explosion of growth in the sector. The world’s supply of stablecoins could swell to as high as $3.7 trillion by 2030 if growing integration of digital assets into traditional finance and favorable macroeconomic conditions continue, Citigroup Inc. analysts said in an April report.

While the sector has already rapidly grown in popularity, stablecoins are still largely used for transactions related to the cryptocurrency market rather than business payments. The total volume of all stablecoin transactions was nearly $4 trillion in February, according to data compiled by Allium Labs and Visa. 

Still, stablecoins remain cumbersome for very large payments due to relatively low liquidity compared with the vast volumes handled by global banks each day. JPMorgan Chase & Co. alone processes around $10 trillion in daily transactions.

“Where it gets clunky is in the hundred of millions of dollars,” said Chris Harmse, co-founder of stablecoin payments company BVNK. “If you are moving interbank-sized flows it will get clunky.” This is likely to change as stablecoins gain further acceptance by existing payment processors, he added.

Today, compliance with taxes and local rules are taking priority for businesses over speed or cost efficiency, according to Gabriele Zuliani, chief revenue officer for crypto exchange Bitso Inc.’s business division.

“Stablecoins still bring a number of structural disadvantages,” Heiko Nix, Siemens global head of cash management and payments, said in an interview. These include currency conversion steps and FX risk, especially when stablecoins are US dollar-pegged and used in a euro environment, Nix said.

Tokenized commercial bank money offers all technical benefits — 24/7 availability, programmability, atomic settlement — while retaining the legal and accounting features of conventional cash,” Nix said. “It integrates seamlessly into our systems without added complexity,” he added.

Risk emanating from cryptoassets could soon become a serious threat to the financial system, according to outgoing Financial Stability Board Chair Klaas Knot.

“At the FSB, we have long maintained that crypto does not yet pose a systemic risk, but recent developments suggest we may be approaching a tipping point,” he said in Madrid on Thursday.

He highlighted that stablecoin issuers “now hold substantial amounts of US Treasuries — this is a segment we must monitor closely.”

In its latest Financial Stability Review in May, the ECB also flagged risks from crypto assets like stablecoins, especially given rising valuations and closer interconnections between the digital-asset ecosystem and traditional finance.

Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster told Reuters earlier this month that the traffic lights from financial regulators were flashing “pretty green” for large firms to grow in crypto. The signals have reinforced Schwab’s plans to offer spot crypto trading within a year, he said.

“CSBS remains concerned with the dramatic and unsupported expansion of the authority of uninsured banks to conduct money transmission or custody activities nationwide without the approval or oversight of host state supervisors,” said Brandon Milhorn, president and CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, in a statement.