Bitcoin Revisits February’s Floor as the Fear Index Sinks to 13

Bitcoin briefly dipped below $60,000 on Friday and the Crypto Fear and Greed Index touched 13, its lowest reading since February. The last time the index sat this deep in extreme-fear territory, the coin spent several weeks near this floor before climbing to over $80,000.

It is back at the same floor, this time carrying a record 13-day spot exchange-traded fund (ETF, an investment product backed by underlying crypto holdings and traded on traditional stock exchanges) outflow streak, a Federal Reserve that just removed its own rate-cut guidance, and SpaceX’s $75 billion initial public offering (IPO) six days away on the calendar.

What February’s Bottom Teaches This Time

The February Setup

When the Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell to 8 in February, the lowest reading of 2026, Bitcoin was testing the same $60,000 level during a broad market sell-off. The index, compiled daily by Alternative.me’s Fear and Greed methodology using six weighted inputs including volatility, market volume, social media sentiment, Bitcoin dominance, survey data, and Google Trends, tracks collective market psychology on a 0-to-100 scale. Scores below 25 fall in what it classifies as extreme-fear territory. A reading of 13 sits deep within that band, comparable to the panic registered during the worst stretches of the 2022 bear cycle.

Volatility and market volume each account for 25% of the daily score, with social media sentiment and survey data contributing 15% each, and Bitcoin dominance and Google Trends data splitting the remaining 20%. Historically, stretches below 20 on the scale have aligned with significant market bottoms, as selling pressure from forced liquidations and panicked exits exhausts itself and discretionary buyers find room to accumulate.

What followed in February was a textbook contrarian outcome. Buyers stepped in as exhausted sellers ran out of supply, and within the following months the coin climbed above $80,000, peaking near $82,000 in mid-May. That roughly ten-week move from floor to high has shaped how part of the market is reading the current setup.

Where the Comparison Breaks

The index reading today is 13, less extreme than February’s 8. Bitcoin’s price at this floor is roughly the same. The structural conditions around both episodes, though, diverge sharply.

The February episode also arrived before May became the worst month of the year for Bitcoin ETF flows, closing with a $2.43 billion net outflow. The scale of institutional de-risking, the Fed’s changed posture, and the capital competition from AI and space IPOs had no presence in February’s setup.

When the Bitcoin Floor Broke

Six events converged across the five trading days beginning June 1, turning a months-long decline into a cascading break through multiple support levels:

• The Mt. Gox bankruptcy estate transferred 10,422 BTC worth roughly $739 million in a single on-chain transaction on June 2. The coins moved to a fresh wallet address with no prior transaction history rather than to any exchange. The estate’s creditor repayment deadline runs through October 2026, keeping a supply-overhang threat active.
• Strategy Inc. (formerly MicroStrategy), the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, sold 32 BTC at an average price of approximately $77,135, generating around $2.5 million. The company had publicly pledged never to sell its holdings since 2020. Its departure from that stance, however small the transaction, rattled a fragile market looking for any signal to exit.
• U.S.-Iran tensions that escalated in late May raised inflation expectations and compressed the odds of Federal Reserve rate reductions. Some Fed officials stated openly they would not rule out rate increases.
• Spot Bitcoin ETFs were already in a multi-day outflow streak before June began, with each session adding selling pressure as issuers liquidated underlying holdings to meet redemptions.
• Roughly $1.86 billion in crypto positions were forcibly liquidated across the 24 hours spanning June 2 evening and June 3 morning. Bitcoin’s break below $70,000 cascaded through leveraged derivatives books in a chain of forced exits.
• Capital was rotating toward AI-linked equities at scale. The S&P 500 excluding AI stocks gained roughly 3.5% in 2026 through May; the AI component significantly outperformed, pulling speculative capital from alternative risk assets including crypto.

Bitcoin was at $77,300 on the morning of June 1. By Wednesday it had touched $65,372. By Friday it briefly crossed below $60,000 for the first time since the February floor.

A Record Thirteen-Day Exodus

The Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETF outflow streak that began May 15 has converted daily redemptions into consistent selling pressure for thirteen straight sessions, the longest such run since U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024. The stretch flipped 2026’s cumulative spot ETF flows negative for the first time since launch, per Coinglass spot Bitcoin ETF flow tracking.

• $4.4 billion: total drained from U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs across the 13 consecutive outflow days
• $3.3 billion: BlackRock’s IBIT fund portion of those outflows
• $54.2 billion: cumulative net inflows since the January 2024 launch, still positive overall despite the streak

How BlackRock Led the Bleeding

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest of the 11 U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETF products by assets, dominated the selling. The fund recorded a single-session outflow of $527.84 million on May 28, the second-largest daily withdrawal in IBIT’s history, missing its all-time record of $528.3 million by less than a million dollars. IBIT accounted for $3.3 billion of the $4.4 billion total across the 13-day streak. A $1.29 billion IBIT dark-pool block executed off-exchange during the same period pointed to institutional portfolio reallocation rather than broad retail panic.

Rising Treasury yields amplified the institutional repricing. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed 18 basis points over three days to 4.82% as rates markets reassessed the probability of Fed cuts. When risk-free returns climb, the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset like Bitcoin increases, and institutional allocators running carry-trade-adjacent strategies were among the first to reduce exposure. Those positions show up as ETF redemptions.

Those vehicles function as a two-way amplifier in practice. Accumulated buying from institutional inflows drives price higher on the way up; redemptions during risk-off periods force issuers to sell underlying holdings and compound the price weakness. The April-to-May reversal, from the best inflow month of the year to the worst outflow month of 2026 in a span of weeks, supplied the structural pressure for the June break. Recovery timelines from comparable outflow events suggest three to six weeks before flows stabilize and turn net positive.

Ethereum’s Parallel Drain

Ethereum’s ETF complex ran the same pattern simultaneously. Spot Ethereum funds shed more than $168 million in the most recent reported week, per data cited by BanklessTimes, and more than $712 million across three weeks. ETH dropped to $1,500 on Friday alongside Bitcoin’s break. XRP fell to $1.06 during the same window. The combined $2.5 trillion erased from total crypto market capitalization since late-2025 peaks reflects all three assets declining in tandem, with no meaningful separation from Bitcoin’s dominant direction.

The $350 Billion Race for Risk Capital

SpaceX filed an IPO prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) targeting $75 billion in proceeds and a $1.75 trillion valuation, according to KraneShares’ analysis of the SpaceX IPO and space equity rally. The listing targets a Nasdaq debut around June 12. SpaceX also holds 18,712 BTC on its balance sheet, acquired at an average cost of around $35,000 per coin, a treasury now considerably underwater on a recent-acquisition basis.

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1 at an estimated $965 billion valuation, edging past OpenAI on paper for the first time. OpenAI is preparing a second-half debut at a private valuation analysts have already placed above $852 billion. Combined with SpaceX and planned secondary issuances from major technology firms, Thierry Borgeat, a financial analyst, estimated roughly $350 billion in equity issuances are siphoning capital away from liquid risk assets. His read on the mechanism investors are using to fund new allocations:

Selling it is the fastest way to free up dollars without triggering tax events on long-held equity positions.

Borgeat’s thesis, cited in financial media this week, holds that crypto held primarily outside retirement accounts is the easiest asset to liquidate when a fund manager needs fresh cash for a new allocation. Crypto positions can be sold without triggering the capital-gains accounting that equity holders with appreciated stock positions would face. Callum Thomas, founder of Top Down Charts, noted separately that space-related stocks rallied in late May at precisely the moment Bitcoin began to roll over, consistent with pre-IPO capital repositioning.

The five largest U.S. cloud hyperscalers are on pace to spend more than $600 billion on infrastructure in 2026, with roughly $450 billion directed toward AI compute and data centers. The AI component of the S&P 500 delivered 11 consecutive record closes in May alone, drawing institutional capital that was once looking for returns in crypto.

The Floor the Chart Needs

Bitcoin’s Relative Strength Index (RSI, a momentum oscillator that measures the speed and magnitude of recent price changes on a 0-to-100 scale) has fallen to 14. Readings below 30 are classified as oversold; 14 is near the floor logged only during the 2018 and 2022 cycle bottoms. The 200-week moving average, a long-term technical support level respected through both of those bear market troughs, currently sits at approximately $61,300, and Bitcoin is testing that level from below. Below roughly $60,000 to $65,000, depending on electricity costs and hardware vintage, a portion of Bitcoin mining operations become unprofitable, a cost-of-production dynamic that has historically attracted buyers when prices reach those levels.

A double-bottom pattern has formed between the February and June lows, with a neckline at $82,495, per technical analysis cited in BanklessTimes. A confirmed close above that level would signal completion of the pattern and project a higher price target. Prediction-market traders on Polymarket assigned a 77% probability to Bitcoin holding $65,000 support through month-end as of June 4, with an 18% probability assigned to a decline to $57,500. The CoinMarketCap Crypto Fear and Greed Index historical chart shows the current 13 reading and February’s 8 as the two deepest sentiment troughs of 2026, with a near-doubling of the price separating them.

Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, told clients on June 4 that the bear market may be approaching its final stages. “I think when we look back at the end of 2026 with BTC at $100,000 and ETH at $4,000, we will say this was the buying zone we all wanted,” Kendrick wrote. The bank’s year-end target of $100,000 would require a roughly 60% recovery from current prices. Kendrick noted that cumulative net ETF inflows since the January 2024 launch still stand at $54.2 billion, with approximately 674,000 BTC held across the 11 U.S.-listed funds.

The May Non-Farm Payrolls report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) came in at 172,000 jobs on Friday, more than double the analyst consensus. An ADP private-sector employment reading showed 122,000 jobs for the same period, while a separate BLS release on April job vacancies showed a sharp increase. A labor market running this hot reduces the near-term probability of Federal Reserve policy easing. SpaceX prices on June 12.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile and carry significant financial risk. Figures cited are accurate as of publication. Consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions.