Bitcoin crashed and flushed leverage out, but is the bottom here yet?

Bitcoin just tested an intraday low of $61,349, triggered roughly $1.76 billion in liquidations with long positions absorbing more than $1.5 billion of that total, and then bounced toward the mid-$63,000s.

Funding rates flipped deeply negative, open interest reset sharply, and the Crypto Fear & Greed Index fell to 12, a level in extreme fear territory.

That is a meaningful amount of technical work compressed into a short window, and the buyers who need to absorb the remaining supply have yet to confirm their return.

What the crash reset

Lacie Zhang, research analyst at Bitget Wallet, argues the technical work from this flush was real. In a note, she said that the $1.76 billion liquidation wave, concentrated in long positions, cleared the most crowded bullish leverage from the order book.

Funding rates moving deeply negative indicate that the leverage bias has shifted from overheated longs to defensives, and the sharp open interest reset means speculative positioning is considerably cleaner than it was last week.

Zhang also frames the equity comparison, noting that the Dow fell 1.2%, the S&P 500 dropped 0.7%, and the Nasdaq declined 0.9% over the same period, with no comparable deleveraging event.

Bitcoin’s 24/7 structure, higher leverage, and more reactive participant base mean it tends to price macro stress faster than equity markets, compressing what equities may absorb over weeks into a few sessions.

On that read, crypto may already be closer to clearing this macro episode than traditional markets are, with a retest of $55,000-$57,000 still plausible if ETF outflows persist, but the probability window for that range is narrowing as technical conditions reset.

Glassnode’s June 3 report notes that Bitcoin had fallen 13% over seven days, the short-term holder cost basis had declined to roughly $76,400, and the 7-day Spot Volume Delta had turned decisively negative, reaching its weakest level since February.

Spot sellers were dominating order books even as prices bounced, and Glassnode concluded the market still lacked evidence of a durable demand response.

Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick maintained a $100,000 year-end 2026 Bitcoin target and said much of the selling may already be over, but also flagged that a move below $60,000 would risk triggering a fresh wave of selling with no natural floor visible below that level.

Why the bounce is still under suspicion

Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at Nansen, reads the exchange flow data as a direct challenge to the recovery narrative.

BTC and ETH both recorded net exchange inflows over the 24 hours following the bounce from $61,000, the first such reversal since the June 1 lows. Traders moving coins onto exchanges are positioning to sell or reduce exposure, and the timing after a bounce points to participants using the recovery as exit liquidity.

The ETF data reinforces Sondergaard’s caution, as US-traded spot Bitcoin ETFs extended their outflow streak to 13 consecutive sessions, accumulating roughly $4.4 billion in withdrawals.

Sondergaard frames this outflow run as mostly confirmatory of deteriorating sentiment and draws a harder line, saying that pension allocators and RIAs operating under compliance mandates do not quickly rebuild exposure after reducing it.

The institutional bid that helped carry Bitcoin from $50,000 to $126,000 across 2024 and 2025, in the form of a structural demand layer from allocators who could only access BTC through the ETF wrapper, has been withdrawing since May, and its return will move at the pace of compliance review cycles.

Sondergaard also notes that leveraged long positioning has not fully normalized, meaning the market may still carry more cleanup ahead even after the liquidation wave.

The checklist for a confirmed bottom

The low-$60,000s represent the immediate survival zone where the market absorbed the latest flush, with the $60,000 handle itself acting as the psychological threshold Kendrick identified as the dividing line between containment and acceleration.

A retest of $55,000-$57,000 represents the bear case if exchange inflows and ETF outflows persist through the week.

Recovery into the mid-to-high $60,000s would represent early traction for the bounce, while the short-term holder cost basis near $76,400 is the stronger confirmation zone, a level where buyers who entered during the last rally return to breakeven.

ETF outflows need to slow or reverse, which would point out that the institutional buyer class has stopped withdrawing liquidity, while BTC and ETH exchange inflows need to fade, reducing the near-term sell overhang.

Whale accumulation needs to strengthen to show that large entities are actively absorbing supply. Funding rates need to normalize without open interest immediately re-leveraging, because a clean reset that gets crowded again within days produces the same fragility the market just unwound.

And spot buying needs to drive the recovery by actively filling the order book, with liquidated longs gone and new bids taking their place.

Until those conditions show up in the data, Bitcoin has completed the forced-selling phase of this correction, while the voluntary sellers, such as the ETF redemptions, the exchange depositors, and the compliance-driven de-riskers, are still active, and the bounce off $61,500 stays a positioning event until buyers confirm it as a floor.

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