Bitcoin steadies at $62,600 as South Koreans flee stocks rout for crypto

Bitcoin BTC$62,717.18 consolidated following Monday’s selloff, trading at $62,600 after tumbling from $64,400 to $61,800 over the course of 24 hours.

Ether (ETH) tracked the larger cryptocurrency, trading in a relatively tight $1,770-$1,790 range. Trading volume across ETH pairs increased by 2.2% to $8.95 billion over the past 24 hours, suggesting a healthy balance of buyers and sellers rather than opposed to apathy.

Lighter (LIT) rebounded from Monday’s downturn, rising by 5.7% since midnight UTC as it looks to stage another rally following a 200% surge since May.

U.S. equities were mixed, with Nasdaq 100 index futures adding 0.31% while S&P 500 index futures fell by 0.12%, reflecting uncertainty after U.S. President Donald Trump said Iran would be hit by “very heavy” strikes on Tuesday.

Gold extended its decline from January’s record high to languish around $4,020 per ounce, falling about 28% since Jan. 29.

• Bitcoin derivatives positioning remains broadly unchanged. Open interest (OI) held at $17.1 billion; the three-month annualized basis stayed at 3.8%; and annualized funding rates ran between 0%–8% across multiple venues — with Bybit’s earlier negative outlier now brought into line.
• No meaningful leverage was added in either direction, and no stress signals emerged in the funding structure.
• Options positioning remains call-biased, but continues to moderate. The 24-hour call/put ratio sits at 58/42, softer than yesterday’s 64/36, and the one-week delta skew has compressed further to ~15% from 26% a week ago.
• The at-the-money term structure stays in contango (front end ~31–32%, long end ~43%), and Deribit’s implied volatility index, DVOL, at 37.43 is near multiyear lows. Low-stress, mild call bias, but the options premium is quietly fading.
• Coinglass data shows $283 million in 24-hour liquidations, with a 74-26 split between longs and shorts. BTC ($66 million) and ETH ($50 million) were the leaders in terms of notional liquidations.
• The Binance liquidation heatmap indicates $61,300 as a core liquidation level to monitor in the event of a price drop.

• Ethena (ENA) mirrored LIT’s surge on Tuesday, rising by 5.7% to lead the altcoin market. Unlike LIT, however, ENA is in a deep downtrend dating back to September, since when it has lost more than 90% of its value.
• There were also encouraging signs in the AI sector on Tuesday, with NEAR rising 3.3% and FET gaining 1.7%.
• JUP and WLFI continued to show weakness amid dwindling trading volume, falling by 1.5% and 0.5%, respectively.
• CoinMarketCap’s “Altcoin Season” indicator paints a more positive picture with a reading of 54/100. It spent most of June below 50/100.
• One potentially bullish driver of altcoin price action could be the deep selloff in South Korea’s stock market. The benchmark KOSPI index has dropped 10% since Friday, leading to an inverse correlation with the country’s crypto exchanges.
• Wu Blockchain reported that Upbit trading volume surged by 1,426% following KOSPI’s plight, indicating a potential unwind of the machine chip trade that saw investors ditch crypto at the tail end of last year.