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Whales, ETFs, and $65,000
Bitcoin’s price action stayed capped while spot exchange-traded funds drew fresh money, as CoinDesk said “Bitcoin whales load up on $1.2 billion in BTC as ETFs attract $750 million.”
“a decisive close above $65,000 is needed for a sustained recovery narrative”
CoinDesk reported that U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $754.69 million in inflows this week and that whales holding 10–10,000 BTC had accumulated over 20,000 BTC ($1.2 billion) since July 29 in a tight range below $65,000.
CoinDesk added that “a decisive close above $65,000 is needed for a sustained recovery narrative,” even as it said the ETF flows pointed to “a tentative recovery in institutional demand.”
The same CoinDesk piece tied the diverging trends to a Coldcard hardware wallet hack that began on July 30 and said the hacker “walk away with $120 million in bitcoin.”
Coldcard sparks custody debate
A separate thread in the finance coverage centered on the Coldcard wallet exploit and its impact on ETF demand, with Cointelegraph saying a week-long streak of inflows into US spot Bitcoin ETFs “has coincided with the Coldcard wallet exploit.”
Cointelegraph reported that Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said he was “not saying it’s connected, we just don’t know,” while adding that “[Although] long-term I can’t imagine there aren’t some who migrate over.”
Cointelegraph also cited TRM Labs for the scale of the breach, saying it “drained more than $116 million worth of Bitcoin from over 5,200 wallet addresses.”
In the same debate, Cointelegraph quoted Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao arguing that storing crypto on centralized exchanges may now be “statistically safer” than self-custody, and it included his explanation that “Hack data is easier to collect on the CEX side.”
ETF flows diverge across products
While spot bitcoin ETF inflows were described as accelerating in the wake of the Coldcard incident, Blockhead said JPMorgan told clients that inflows into Hyperliquid’s spot ETFs “have largely stopped.”
“inflows into Hyperliquid's spot ETFs have largely stopped”
Blockhead reported that JPMorgan’s analysts, led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, said HYPE ETFs pulled in roughly $280 million cumulatively through June, then saw July bring more than $13 million in net outflows and a streak of $29.8 million in outflows across twelve consecutive sessions through August 3.
Blockhead framed the slowdown as competition from “newly regulated, US-based perpetual futures platforms,” and it quoted JPMorgan: “We see significant challenges to the market share of decentralized platforms such as Hyperliquid.”
In parallel, CryptoSlate said BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs shed $3.5 billion in Q2 via capital-share transactions, reversing a $13.9 billion gain a year earlier, and it specified that the activity reflected “share creations and redemptions, not market prices.”
