Bitcoin traded at around $63,000 on Monday, Claw again From a two-month low hit on June 5, a confluence of headwinds — spot ETF outflows, macro uncertainty, and a rotation of capital into AI stocks — pushed the world’s largest cryptocurrency below its roughly 50% mark. Highest level ever $126,279 reached in October 2025.
This retreat sparked familiar scenes of surrender. Retail investors have largely retreated, and major headlines have skewed toward fear. But a growing chorus of institutional voices is forcefully resisting.
In a report published Monday, analysts at Wall Street brokerage Bernstein said Bitcoin’s long-term “store of value” thesis remains unchanged, even as net flows into spot exchange-traded funds and corporate treasuries slow to $12 billion so far in 2026, down sharply from $60 billion in 2025.
The company attributed the bulk of the selling pressure not to ETF holders, but to corporate treasuries liquidating their positions — with spot ETFs recording only about $2.6 billion in net outflows year-to-date.
“Bitcoin being boring this cycle should not be held against,” Bernstein wrote, adding that the slowdown in retail momentum does not undermine Bitcoin’s structural ownership case.
The brokerage report highlighted that 61% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply has not moved in over a year – a figure that indicates a base of coin holders unwilling to sell at current prices.
Bernstein maintained a Target price $150,000 For Bitcoin in 2026, indicating a structural shift in the investor base towards institutions including wealth management platforms, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
The company has previously described early 2026 as the “weakest bearish event” in Bitcoin history, arguing that growing adoption among banks and major investment firms separates the current downturn from previous crypto winters.
Institutions are accumulating Bitcoin while retail stays away
The pressure on prices in the near term has several identifiable sources. capital She turned around AI is moving at a historic pace, with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into high-tech companies and big tech names in recent months.
SpaceX’s IPO, scheduled for June 12 on the Nasdaq and targeting a valuation between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, has largely drawn retail attention away from digital assets, according to analysts tracking the reallocation. The strategy’s Bitcoin sell-off added more selling pressure to the market.
On the legislative front, the CLARITY Act — a sweeping digital asset market structure bill that would divide regulatory authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC — won approval from the Senate Banking Committee in May by a 15-9 vote. vote.
The bill was approved in the House of Representatives last July by a vote of 294 to 134. Its eventual passage into law could resolve years of regulatory uncertainty that has kept institutional capital on the edge of the market.
Brownstone Research Senior Cryptocurrency Analyst Ben Lilly Draw a direct parallel to the bear market in 2022, when BlackRock launched a private bitcoin trust in August of that year at the height of the downturn — a move that predated the launch of the most successful ETF in history, BlackRock’s Instant Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), which reached $80 billion in assets under management five times faster than the previous record holder, Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF.
Lilly said the same rules of the game are at work again: institutions build while retailers inspect.
