Bitcoin traded around $63,000 on Monday, clawing back from a two-month low hit on June 5 as a confluence of headwinds — spot ETF outflows, macro uncertainty, and capital rotation into artificial intelligence stocks — pushed the world’s largest cryptocurrency roughly 50% below its all-time high of $126,279 reached in October 2025.
The decline has triggered familiar scenes of capitulation. Retail investors have largely stepped back, and mainstream headlines have leaned into the fear. But a growing chorus of institutional voices is pushing back hard.
In a report published Monday, analysts at Wall Street brokerage Bernstein said Bitcoin’s long-term “store of value” thesis is unchanged, even as net inflows into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds and corporate treasury companies have slowed to $12 billion so far in 2026, down sharply from $60 billion in 2025.
The firm attributed the bulk of selling pressure not to ETF holders, but to corporate treasury companies liquidating 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 it,” Bernstein wrote, adding that the slowdown in retail momentum does not undermine the structural ownership case for Bitcoin.
The brokerage’s report highlighted that 61% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply has not moved in more than a year — a figure that points to a base of holders unwilling to sell at current prices.
Bernstein has maintained a price target of $150,000 for Bitcoin in 2026, citing a structural shift in the investor base toward institutions including wealth management platforms, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds.
The firm has previously described early 2026 as featuring the “weakest bear case” in Bitcoin’s history, arguing that growing adoption among banks and major investment firms separates the current downturn from previous crypto winters.
Institutions accumulate Bitcoin while retail rotates away
The near-term pressure on prices has several identifiable sources. Capital has rotated at a historic pace toward the AI trade, with hundreds of billions flowing into hyperscalers and large-cap technology names in recent months.
The SpaceX IPO, set for June 12 on Nasdaq and targeting a valuation between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, has drawn significant retail attention away from digital assets, according to analysts tracking the reallocation. Strategy’s Bitcoin sales have added further selling pressure to the market.
On the legislative front, the CLARITY Act — a comprehensive digital asset market structure bill that would divide regulatory authority between the SEC and the CFTC — cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May by a 15-9 vote.
The bill passed the House last July with a 294-134 vote. Its final passage into law could resolve years of regulatory uncertainty that has held institutional capital at the edge of the market.
Brownstone Research senior crypto analyst Ben Lilly drew a direct parallel to the bear market of 2022, when BlackRock launched a private Bitcoin trust in August of that year at the depth of the downturn — a move that preceded the most successful ETF launch in history, BlackRock’s spot 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.
The same playbook, Lilly argued, is running again: institutions are building while retail checks out.
