Bitcoin is absorbing heavy sales from the German government while Golem appears to have offloaded nine figures worth of ETH.
Crypto markets bounced on Monday after a heavy late-Sunday sell-off.
Bitcoin (BTC) recovered its Sunday losses after shedding 7% on July 7. The bounce suggests a double-bottom formation near support at $54,000, with BTC jumping 3.7% from $55,640 to $57,850 in less than one hour as $65 million worth of short positions were liquidated.
Ethereum (ETH) similarly rebounded back above $3,040 after testing $2,800 during Monday’s early hours. Solana and Polkadot each posted gains of 0.5%.
Celestia (TIA), Starknet (STRK), and Notcoin (NOT) were the best performing among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap over the past 24 hours with gains of $14.8%, 9.8%, and 7%, respectively.
NOT is also the strongest performing asset of the past seven days with a 21.2% rally. Only five digital assets are currently sitting on a weekly gain.
Notably, crypto short positions suffered heavier liquidations than long positions over the past 12 hours, driving $159.4 million of $202.1 million worth of margin calls. Shorts also accounted for $184 million of the $350.4 million in liquidations over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass.
Roughly 88,240 traders suffered margin calls over the past day.
Spot Ether ETFs loom
The market volatility comes as analysts continue to delay their predictions for spot Ether ETFs receiving final approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). While the SEC approved the funds’ 19b-4 forms in May, the regulator still needs to greenlight the S-1 registration statements from prospective issuers.
Nate Geraci, co-founder of ETF Institute, predicted that the funds will launch within the fortnight after the SEC requested issuers to submit revised filings by July 8.
“Will be shocked if spot ETH ETFs [are] not trading w/in next 2 weeks,” Geraci tweeted.
“Later next week [is] a possibility, but think week of July 15th [is] more likely.”
Despite analysts tipping that the launch of spot Ether ETFs is imminent, Golem, an Ethereum-based decentralized computing protocol that conducted an initial coin offering in November 2016, was spotted moving more than $115 million worth of ETH onto centralized exchanges over the past 37 days, according to data from Arkham Intelligence.
With Golem moving assets to Binance, Coinbase, and Bitfinex in the past 37 days, the transfers likely contributed to the recent selling pressure plaguing the Ethereum markets.
German government dumps 17,500 BTC in 20 days
Bitcoin appears to be absorbing even heavier sales, with the wallet believed to be controlled by German authorities offloading significant sums of BTC every day since the start of July, according to Arkham Intelligence.
In January, German police announced they had seized 50,000 BTC from an individual who worked for Movie2k, a popular website that distributed pirated films between 2008 and 2013. The person agreed to transfer their Bitcoin to the authorities after being held in custody since they were arrested in 2019 for suspicions of money laundering.
Last month, BTC began flowing out of the wallet, with the outflows accelerating in recent days. On Monday the wallet transferred 2,206 Bitcoin ($123 million). The wallet now holds just 32,488 BTC worth $1.86 billion, down from $3.2 billion when it began offloading funds on June 19.
Mainstream markets post minor losses
Meanwhile, in mainstream markets, U.S. stock futures edged lower on Monday morning as investors awaited key inflation data. S&P futures were down by more than 0.1%, while futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.19%. Nasdaq 100 futures dipped about 0.14%.
However, the release of the June consumer price index on Thursday and the producer price index data on Friday could influence market expectations should the numbers show slight improvements.
