The Ether (ETH) futures market saw its open interest (OI) on Gate.io fall by 45% to levels last seen in April 2025. At the same time, nearly 480,000 ETH left Binance, OKX, Gemini and Bitfinex over the past few days, reducing the exchange-held supply. 

The combined shift highlights a market with less leverage and declining exchange balances, placing greater focus on the $1,500 support zone, which some analysts view as critical to preventing a deeper move toward $1,000. 

Ether open interest falls across exchanges

Ether’s futures market has undergone a broad reset during the recent sell-off. Crypto analyst Amr Taha noted that total ETH open interest across exchanges has dropped 25%, to $12.6 billion from $16.6 billion in May, with several major trading platforms now at levels last seen in April 2025.

Ether open interest. Source: CryptoQuant

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Gate.io recorded the largest decline. ETH open interest fell to $2.68 billion on June 9 from $4.84 billion on May 7, a drop of about 45%. The figure is now nearly identical to the $2.67 billion level recorded on April 11, 2025.

Bybit has followed a similar path. ETH OI currently stands near $805 million, close to the $795 million recorded in early April 2025. The move points to a significant reduction in leveraged positions that accumulated during the latter stages of 2025 and early 2026.

ETH open interest on multiple exchanges. Source: CryptoQuant

However, Binance presents a different picture. ETH open interest remains near $2.76 billion, holding within its recent range. The funding rates have also turned negative on the exchange, with the latest reading near -0.0047, showing short traders are paying a premium to maintain their positions.

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ETH funding rate on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant

The divergence is notable. Gate.io and Bybit have already seen a major leverage reset. Futures traders on Binance remain active, but the negative funding points to a cautious sentiment. 

Related: Bitmine boosts Ethereum treasury to 5.54M ETH, nearing 5% supply target

ETH supply drop meets key support at $1,500

Ether exchange reserves also posted a notable decline in early June. Across Binance, OKX, Gemini and Bitfinex, tracked ETH balances fell by 480,000 ETH over the past few days. 

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ETH multi-exchange reserve. Source: CryptoQuant

Binance reserves dropped to 3.65 million ETH on June 9 from 3.87 million ETH on June 4. Bitfinex holdings declined to 2.50 million ETH from 2.67 million ETH at the end of May. OKX recorded the sharpest percentage decline, with reserves falling from 424,000 ETH to about 336,000 ETH. Gemini balances also slipped to roughly 522,000 ETH.

Continued ETH outflows could reduce the amount of readily available supply on exchanges if buying demand starts to recover. 

Onchain data shows many ETH holders are still far from large profits. According to market commentator Gonza Goth, only 11% of Ethereum’s supply is currently sitting at a 3x or greater gain, the lowest level since February 2017. However, Goth said, 

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“Historically, extreme pessimism has created the best opportunities.”

ETH: relative supply by profit and loss. Source: Glassnode

Meanwhile, traders are also watching the $1,500 level next. Investor Ash Crypto noted that Ether failed to hold every support level during the 2022 bear market, when the price eventually bottomed near $880. 

The analyst said a weekly close above $1,500 would keep ETH above a historically important support zone, while a break below it would shift attention toward the next major support area near $1,000.

ETH/USD, one-week chart analysis by Ash. Source: X

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Related: ETH falls to 13-month low on Zcash bug, Bitcoin below $60K: Is $1.4K next?

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Bitcoin News: Circle has launched cirBTC, a 1:1 BTC-backed ERC-20 token now live on Ethereum mainnet, positioning it directly against WBTC’s roughly $9 billion market and approximately 85% market share with a feature its competitors do not offer: real-time on-chain reserve verification with no reliance on third-party attestations.

The product went live June 8, 2026, and is built exclusively for institutional participants, OTC desks, market makers, lenders, and DeFi protocols deploying Bitcoin as collateral inside Ethereum-based smart contract ecosystems.

The competitive target is explicit. BitGo’s Wrapped Bitcoin has dominated tokenized BTC since its January 2019 launch, and Coinbase’s cbBTC has emerged as the primary institutional challenger since September 2024, reaching approximately $5.9 billion in market value.

Circle is entering that race with a specific transparency argument and the institutional trust built over years of USDC issuance.

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Bitcoin News: cirBTC’s Reserve Verification Model, What Real-Time On-Chain Proof Actually Means

The core technical differentiator is Chainlink Proof of Reserve. Each cirBTC token issued as an ERC-20 on Ethereum is backed by native Bitcoin held in segregated regulated custody, and counterparties can verify that backing in real time through multiple wallet addresses visible directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, no waiting for monthly audits, no relying on custodian claims, no off-chain attestation lag.

This is structurally different from the WBTC model, where BitGo operates as the sole custodian and publishes wallet addresses for manual verification, but reserve confirmation still depends on BitGo’s centralized control and governance multisig for contract changes.

The RenBTC wind-down and broader criticism of custodial bridge opacity established the trust gap Circle is explicitly targeting. Chainlink’s automated feed closes the verification loop at the contract level rather than at the audit cycle.

Bitcoin assets are kept separate from Circle’s corporate holdings, and minting and redemption run through Circle Mint, its institutional liquidity management platform.

The same infrastructure that powers USDC settlement rails is now extended to wrapped Bitcoin collateral, allowing firms to hold native BTC in custody while cirBTC moves through on-chain financial applications without ever selling the underlying position.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

The $15–20B Tokenized BTC Market: Where cirBTC Fits Against WBTC and cbBTC

The total tokenized Bitcoin supply across all wrapped products sits at approximately $15–20 billion in Q2 2026, still under 2% of Bitcoin’s roughly $1.7 trillion market capitalization.

That number is either a ceiling that reflects structural barriers to institutional DeFi adoption or an enormous runway.

The evidence points firmly toward runway: institutional demand for Bitcoin exposure in regulated on-chain formats has accelerated materially since 2024, and the products capturing that demand are precisely the regulated, exchange-native wrappers cirBTC is competing against.

WBTC holds approximately 119,000 tokens in circulation at roughly $8–9 billion market cap, controlling close to 85% of the wrapped BTC segment. cbBTC trails at approximately $5.9 billion but has grown faster than any comparable product since launch.

Other exchange-backed offerings, Kraken Wrapped BTC, Binance Wrapped BTC, Bitget Wrapped BTC, OKX Wrapped BTC, collectively hold the remaining margin.

Circle’s entry does not change the market structure overnight, but it introduces a credentialed issuer with an existing institutional distribution network that none of those exchange-native products can fully replicate.

Circle’s stated structural advantage over cbBTC and exchange-issued wrappers is neutrality: it does not operate a centralized exchange, DEX, or lending protocol.

Institutions using cirBTC as DeFi collateral are not simultaneously providing liquidity intelligence to a competing trading desk. That separation matters to prime brokerage clients and multi-venue market makers who treat information leakage as a material risk.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

The post Bitcoin On Ethereum? Circle Launches cirBTC on ETH Targeting $9B WBTC Market appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Meme coin traders enter the second week of June 2026 with three setups worth watching. SIREN presses against breakout resistance, BinanceLife cools near record highs, and BUILDON climbs back from a sharp correction.

Each token shows a different momentum picture this week. The charts below map the key levels, the indicators behind them, and what would confirm or break every move.

Meme Coins to Watch: SIREN Tests Breakout Resistance Near $1.20

Siren (SIREN) trades around $1.22 after a 4% gain on the day. The token has climbed roughly 113% over the past week. Its market cap sits near $887 million, ranking it 74th.

SIREN also topped last week’s meme coin watchlist and keeps building on that move.

On the daily chart, price is pressing into resistance at the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement level near $1.20. A daily close above this zone would mark the breakout. The next resistance stands at the 0.786 level near $2.20.

Beyond that, the token’s record high sits at $3.61. The chart’s upper Fibonacci extension reaches $4.72. Both mark longer-term targets if momentum holds.

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) has pushed above 70. That reading signals strong momentum, but it also flags overbought conditions. A rejection here could send the price lower.

The first support sits at the 0.5 Fibonacci level near $0.79. A deeper pullback would test the 0.382 level near $0.52. A renewed AI-token rally has driven much of this momentum.

BinanceLife Holds Near Record Highs Despite RSI Divergence

BinanceLife (BINANCELIFE) trades near $0.69 after a 12% drop on the day. Despite the decline, the token remains up about 9% on the week. Its market cap stands at $687 million, ranking it 86th.

The token sits in a price-discovery phase after setting a record high near $0.90 on June 7. It broke out of a symmetrical triangle around May 13 and ran straight to that resistance box.

However, the daily chart now shows a bearish RSI divergence. Price made higher highs while the RSI made lower highs. That pattern often warns that an uptrend is losing strength.

A correction could send the price back to the former swing high near $0.46. A deeper drop would test the 0.382 Fibonacci level near $0.27. The token’s role in the BNB meme season remains a key driver.

BUILDon Recovers After an A-B-C Correction

BUILDon (B) trades near $0.27 after a 6% decline on the day. The token has gained almost 14% over the past week. Its market cap sits near $273 million, ranking it 138th.

The daily chart shows a five-wave Elliott impulse to a high near $0.76. An A-B-C correction then followed. The C wave bottomed close to the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement near $0.20.

Price now recovers between the 0.5 and 0.382 Fibonacci levels. A move above $0.33 would open the path toward the 0.236 level near $0.46. That level marks the next major resistance.

The RSI hovers near 50, a neutral reading with no clear momentum. Volume is also contracting into the bounce. Both signals suggest traders should wait for confirmation.

The main support sits at the 0.786 Fibonacci level near $0.14. BUILDon gained wider attention after its Binance Alpha listing earlier this year.

The post 3 Meme Coins to Watch in the Second Week of June 2026 appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Citrini Research, the subscription analytics firm whose reports have previously triggered sharp moves in AI-linked equities, published an analysis Monday calling Hyperliquid a compelling investment thesis. The firm argues the decentralized exchange accounts for nearly half of all token buyback… Read the full story at The Defiant

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Solana Institute CEO Kristin Smith is urging the US Senate to pass the CLARITY crypto market structure bill with developer protections intact, arguing that open-source developers and blockchain infrastructure providers should not be regulated as financial intermediaries.

In a thread on the X social media platform, Smith said the market structure legislation “has a real shot at passing the Senate,” making it critical for lawmakers to preserve protections for software developers.

Source: Kristin Smith on X.com

Smith said more than 60 crypto CEOs and founders, including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, signed an open letter urging the Senate to maintain robust developer protections in the CLARITY Act.

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She said that open-source developers, validators and non-custodial wallet providers do not control user funds or execute transactions and therefore should not be treated as brokers or custodians.

Smith pointed to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), which would provide legal certainty for noncontrolling software developers and blockchain infrastructure providers that do not custody customer assets or control transactions.

Introduced in January by Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden, the bipartisan BRCA aims to prevent open-source developers from being classified as “money transmitters” solely for publishing software code.

The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May and was recently placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar, setting the stage for a possible floor vote later this summer.

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Related: CLARITY Act will help reshore US crypto industry, attorney says

Echoes SEC commissioner Peirce’s calls for developer protections

Smith’s comments echo recent remarks by US Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner (SEC) Hester Peirce, who argued last week that publishing open-source blockchain code is protected speech and that developers should not be treated as financial intermediaries simply because others use their software.

Speaking at the IC3 Blockchain Camp at Princeton University, Peirce said that “many blockchain projects involve publishing open-source software, which is generally a protected activity under the First Amendment.”

Source: CoinMarketCap on X.com

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The SEC’s mandate regarding digital assets has evolved significantly under current Chair Paul Atkins, who vowed to end the agency’s “regulation through enforcement” approach to the industry. 

Related: US lawmakers push back on Labor Department plans to include crypto in 401(k)s

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Cardano’s ecosystem health, tracked across DeFi value, network use, and positioning, has slipped into outright collapse, according to BeInCrypto’s read of the data. Yet on June 7, the largest ADA wallets quietly started buying.

That contradiction is the story. Whales accumulating into a measured collapse is rarely a bottom call, and the derivatives data points to a colder motive than recovery.

The Cardano Decay Tracker Hit Collapse

Start with the signal in the headline. The ecosystem read on Cardano, which weighs DeFi value against network activity, has reached its worst level.

Want more token insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya’s Daily Crypto Newsletter here.

The core input is total value locked, the dollar sum staked across a chain’s apps. Cardano’s TVL sits near $94 million, down about 31% on the month and roughly 87% from its $721 million peak.

By this framing, a chain shedding that much locked value with no offsetting growth is in collapse, not correction. The label is a measured verdict, not a mood.

This was already an ecosystem in trouble. Analytics platform TapTools shut down, and its founder, Charles Hoskinson, warned of a coming wave of failures.

Into that backdrop, the whales did the one thing the data says they should not. They started buying.

The Whales Bought on the Worst Day

Here is the twist. Two whale cohorts, meaning wallets large enough to move the Cardano price when they trade, began adding ADA on June 7.

Wallets holding 1 million to 10 million ADA lifted their share of supply from 15.24% to 15.28%. The largest tier, 100 million to 1 billion ADA, grew its stash from 5.83% to 6.16%.

The date matters. June 7-8 brought no good news. Investigator Thomas Braziel escalated a probe into Cardano’s founder that day, naming the original 2016 foundation board and pressing on roughly 1,090 Bitcoin missing from the early foundation.

The Cardano price was already near $0.16, a five-year low. Accumulating into a deepening scandal and a collapsing ecosystem is not how conviction buying usually looks. So the buying is real, but the reason is not fundamental. The derivatives data reveal what it likely is.

Big Traders Short, Retail Long

The motive sharpens on the futures side. The largest accounts and the crowd sit on opposite sides of the trade.

The top-trader long-short ratio, which tracks how accounts in the top 20% by margin are positioned, is 1.53. The all-accounts ratio sits at 2.09, a divergence of 0.57.

Retail is far more aggressively long than the biggest traders, the widest gap in weeks. When informed accounts lean against the crowd this hard, the crowd usually ends up wrong.

Note: Both cohorts are still net long, but the top traders are short relative to retail, holding far fewer longs than the crowd. That relative gap is the widest in weeks, and informed money leaning back while retail piles in is the classic shape of a top, not a floor.

Leverage has also drained. Open interest, the total value of live futures contracts, fell about 39% over 30 days to $70.6 million, with funding near neutral. That thins the fuel, so any squeeze would be smaller than the lopsided positioning alone suggests.

Still, the skew is what matters here. Big traders short against a heavily long crowd is the setup for a squeeze, and that skew is the missing piece of the whale puzzle.

The Dark Theory: Engineered Exit Liquidity

Now the pieces lock. The accumulation reads less like a bottom and more like a setup for exit liquidity.

Retail spot selling has cooled. The net outflows that ran through June 7 eased by June 8, hinting retail is ready to buy again rather than dump.

The likely sequence follows. Whales accumulate spot, retail buying lifts the Cardano price, and that push forces heavy shorts to cover, triggering a short squeeze where forced buying accelerates the move higher.

A sharp squeeze would hand the accumulating Cardano whales the liquidity to sell into. Retail supplies the exit, the shorts supply the fuel, and the whales step out near the top.

It is a cynical read, not a certainty. But with the decay tracker at collapse and no catalyst in sight, exit liquidity explains the buying better than recovery does.

What Would Break this Cardano Theory

Because the thesis is dark, the counter-signals matter. A few developments would flip it.

Whale accumulation sustained over weeks rather than days would point to real conviction. A genuine rebound in TVL or a credible answer to the governance probe would give the buyer a fundamental floor.

None of that exists yet. The most grounded reading is that the whales are not calling a Cardano bottom. They are building a position to sell into whoever buys the bounce.

The decay tracker was already flashing collapse. The whales did not ignore it. They may be planning to profit from everyone who does.

The post Cardano Whales are Quietly Buying a Collapsing Chain, and the Motive is Dark appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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XRP price is trading at $1.16–$1.18, up more than 2% today, while Bitcoin consolidates below key resistance and Solana drifts without a clear prediction. The split is sharp enough to demand attention.

The rally was not much, but the weekly drawdown is less than 8%, outperforming Bitcoin 10% and Solana 16%.

Macro headwinds, like stubborn Fed rate-cut and risk-off positioning are suppressing the wider market. XRP is simply absorbing those headwinds better than its peers right now.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

XRP Price Prediction: $1.35 or Does the Retrace Come First?

XRP is pressing against immediate resistance at $1.18, with the next meaningful ceiling at $1.21 and then $1.26. A clean break above $1.26 opens the path toward $1.37, which our analyst flags as the first major resistance level on a longer timeframe.

Support layers sit at $1.10, $1.06, and $1.03. Our technical team warns that a retrace to $0.47 is possible in a worst-case scenario if macro conditions deteriorate sharply, though that would represent a deep flush with a very low chance.

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If XRP can hold above $1.18, it could as well reclaim $1.26, and Clarity Act catalyst could push a run toward $1.6. Although price could likely consolidate between $1.10 and $1.21 over the next week as macro noise persists, building a tighter coil for the next move.

But a close below $1.0 would break the post-breakout structure entirely and likely drag XRP back toward the $0.90 range. Relative to Bitcoin, XRP still holds a performance edge, but that edge narrows quickly if risk appetite deteriorates further.

Longer-dated targets remain aggressive: AI-driven scenarios project $5 by late 2025 via a $2.20 interim level, while community analysts openly discuss $4–$7 by year-end.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

LiquidChain Targets Early-Mover Upside as XRP Tests Key Levels

XRP’s outperformance makes the bull case feel obvious. But at a current price of above a dollar with resistance stacked immediately overhead, the asymmetric window may already be narrowing. That’s where early-stage infrastructure plays attract attention.

LiquidChain is an L3 infrastructure project currently in presale at $0.01468 per $LIQUID token, with $830K raised to date. Its core proposition is a Unified Liquidity Layer that fuses Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity into a single execution environment. Developers deploy once and access all three ecosystems simultaneously.

Single-Step Execution and Verifiable Settlement are the two architectural features that differentiate it from existing cross-chain bridges, which typically fragment liquidity rather than consolidate it. The addressable market is real: fragmented liquidity across BTC, ETH, and SOL chains is one of the most persistent inefficiencies in the current infrastructure stack.

Research LiquidChain before the presale concludes.

The post XRP Price Prediction: Market Falling But XRP Outperforms Bitcoin and Solana appeared first on Cryptonews.

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TLDR

• Bitwise says Bitcoin often reacts before equities during liquidity shifts.
• Bitcoin and Ether hit cycle lows as the Nasdaq fell 5%.
• US 10-year Treasury yield held near 4.53% after strong labor data.
• Global M2 climbed to $122.6 trillion despite a crypto retracement.
• SSR RSI dropped to 13, signaling oversold liquidity conditions.

Bitcoin traded near $62,000 as Bitwise linked its pullback to tightening financial conditions. The asset manager said BTC often acts as a “canary in the macro coal mine.” It argued that recent price action reflects a broader risk-off shift across global markets.

Bitcoin Moves Ahead of Equities in Risk Repricing

Bitwise reported that Bitcoin and Ether fell to $58,000 and $1,507 during the recent downturn. At the same time, the Nasdaq posted a 5% daily decline, its sharpest drop in months. South Korea’s KOSPI also halted trading temporarily after a heavy sell-off in semiconductor stocks.

The firm said Bitcoin usually reacts before traditional markets because it trades around the clock. “BTC often acts as a canary in the macro coal mine,” Bitwise stated. It added that crypto prices adjust quickly to liquidity changes while equities respond later.

Stronger US labor data reduced expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts. As a result, the US 10-year Treasury yield held near 4.53% after reaching 4.68% last month. Higher-for-longer rate expectations pressured growth-sensitive assets across markets.

Liquidity Data Shows Stablecoin Buying Power

A chart comparing Bitcoin, the Nasdaq, and Global M2 shows diverging trends. Global M2 rose to about $122.6 trillion over the past year. Meanwhile, Bitcoin retreated sharply from its $126,000 cycle high.

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Bitwise said the pattern suggests Bitcoin may have repriced earlier than equities. If liquidity conditions improve later, the firm sees room for renewed price response. It noted that global liquidity continues to expand despite recent volatility.

Onchain metrics also highlight available capital within crypto markets. Independent analyst Maartunn said the stablecoin supply ratio RSI fell to 13, an oversold level. He explained that lower SSR readings indicate larger stablecoin balances relative to Bitcoin’s market value.

The SSR compares Bitcoin’s market capitalization with major stablecoins like USDT and USDC. Historically, similar readings appeared near accumulation zones before stronger price periods. Exchange data supports this view with stablecoin reserves near $72 billion.

USDT accounts for $57.7 billion of exchange balances, while USDC holds about $12 billion. Although reserves declined from peaks above $80 billion in late 2025, levels remain elevated. Bitcoin now trades near the lower end of its recent range as liquidity stays positioned on exchanges.

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Anthropic is reportedly set to release a public version of its Mythos AI model, and crypto analyst The DeFi Investor is urging decentralized finance users to act before that happens.

The concern is based on how good Mythos is at finding software vulnerabilities, and a version of it becoming widely accessible could accelerate the speed at which attackers discover and exploit weaknesses in DeFi protocols.

What the DeFi Community Needs to Do

In a June 9 post on X, The DeFi Investor advised followers to revoke all token approvals, use only heavily audited dApps, and spread funds across several wallets to reduce single points of failure.

For those who are not familiar, token approvals are permissions that users give to smart contracts, allowing the contracts to spend tokens on their behalf. They tend to accumulate silently over time, and they represent a standing attack surface if any approved contract is later found to be vulnerable.

“What’s scary about Mythos is that it’s insanely good at finding severe vulnerabilities,” wrote The DeFi Investor. “Claude Opus 4.8 has also recently identified a critical bug for Zcash, and Mythos is supposed to be even better than Opus 4.8.”

They added that DeFi will face a huge stress test in the next few months, and indeed, the Zcash vulnerability they mentioned gave a concrete illustration of this.

The privacy coin lost more than 35% of its value in one day after a security researcher using AI discovered a bug in its shielded Orchard pool that would’ve allowed bad actors to endlessly mint new ZEC tokens. It saw big-time crypto investor Arthur Hayes exit his entire ZEC position, as uncertainty mounted on whether anyone might have already exploited the flaw.

Mythos has been restricted since April to about 50 organizations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, through an Anthropic initiative known as Project Glasswing, in an attempt to put the model’s capabilities to work for defensive purposes. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic plans to expand that circle by 150 more organizations across 15 countries.

However, multiple sources, including TFTC and journalist Alex Heath, have claimed that the public version of Mythos will carry “substantial guardrails” and will not be as permissive as what Project Glasswing partners can access.

A Debate DeFi Was Already Having

The DeFi Investor’s security tips have come at a time when a conversation has been building around the viability of decentralized finance.

In late May, OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz declared “all of DeFi unsafe” and said he had advised people to exit positions in major protocols, including Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound. His reason for doing that was that AI has tilted the security balance so far toward attackers that no protocol can currently be trusted to safely hold users’ funds.

And truly, many crypto projects have been hit in the last few months, including attacks on KelpDAO and Drift Protocol in April, which led to the loss of more than $570 million combined. More recently, hackers reportedly siphoned at least $30 million worth of Humanity Protocol’s H token from 17 wallets.

However, according to Aave Chan Initiative founder Mark Zeller, the fears about AI have been overblown, with fewer than 10% of DeFi security failures in the past year having been caused by code-level vulnerabilities.

Anthropic’s own position, per Bloomberg, is that in the long run, AI will favor defenders, but “the transitional period will be fraught.”

The post DeFi Users Warned to Revoke Approvals Before Anthropic’s Mythos AI Launches appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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