Bitcoin (BTC) slipped below $63,000 on Aug. 14. It closed in on its August lows even as a tame US inflation print lifted stocks, and spot bitcoin ETFs logged their first back-to-back daily outflows since late July.
BTC/USD changed hands at $62,570 at the time of writing. That was down 1.3% on the day and near the weakest levels of the month, according to TradingView data cited by Cointelegraph. US equities, meanwhile, closed Thursday at all-time highs. The S&P 500 was up 0.11%. The Nasdaq Composite was up 0.14%. Bitcoin pulled in the opposite direction, breaking from the risk assets it has at times tracked.
Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded outflows on consecutive days for the first time since late July, CoinDesk reported. The two-day drawdown ends a run of mostly positive flows through early August. It points to a cooling in one of the structural demand channels that underpinned bitcoin’s spring rally. The article did not specify the dollar amount.
Leveraged longs are taking the immediate hit. Binance BTC futures open interest (the total of active derivative positions, long and short) hit $8.15 billion on Wednesday, then fell with the price. The correlation between Binance open interest and BTC/USD reached 0.25 on Thursday as both declined, Cointelegraph reported, citing CryptoQuant analysis.
“The simultaneous drop in both price and OI indicates that leveraged long positions are giving up, getting stopped out, or facing liquidation,” BorisD, a CryptoQuant community analyst, wrote in analysis published Thursday. He added that “the Binance Open Interest (OI) Correlation and liquidation warning signals clearly reveal the process of leveraged positions being flushed out.” Total 24-hour cross-crypto liquidations stood at $236 million at the time of writing, per CoinGlass data cited in the same report.
The slide adds to a divergence that has been building all week. US inflation data described by Cointelegraph as “encouraging” pushed equities to record closes but produced what trading firm QCP Capital called a muted crypto response. “This week has reinforced the distinction between resilience and momentum: the range remains intact, but softer inflation data have so far generated only a muted response from crypto,” QCP wrote in its Aug. 14 market note. The firm pointed macro traders toward the Aug. 26 release of the PCE price index. That is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge. In July it recorded its first monthly decline since 2020, per Bureau of Economic Analysis data.
Onchain signals offer no relief. Glassnode’s composite indicator is in its longest “capitulation” phase since the end of the last bear market in 2022, Cointelegraph reported. The analytics firm’s weekly newsletter noted that “traders have added substantial risk, most of it long, into a market that shows no matching demand.” CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju wrote on X that “the stars haven’t aligned for a Bitcoin bull run just yet,” adding that onchain indicators remain in “bear” territory.
Traders are now watching Sunday’s weekly close as a short-term pivot. Analyst and trader Rekt Capital flagged $63,220 as the level to hold, warning on X that “a Weekly Close below the orange level would probably set price up for a breakdown.” Bitcoin’s 50-month exponential moving average sat at $65,827 and had flipped back to resistance, a setup Rekt Capital said was “copying the 2022 bear market.”
Holders, as ever, are split. Bitcoin has traded in a tight range since June. The leveraged long flush, in that frame, reads more like a position cleanout than a directional verdict.
