Bitcoin spent the past month in a holding pattern around $63,700, and VanEck’s latest Bitcoin ChainCheck reads the setup as a cautious pause rather than a bottom, with derivatives flashing fear, miner economics near multi-year lows, and long-term holders tightening their grip.
The mid-July report frames the moment as consolidation, not recovery. Bitcoin closed July 12 at $63,742, flat against a month earlier yet 33% off its six-month high and 14% below its 200-day moving average near a bitcoin price of $74,000.
The pause caps two monthly declines, a 3.6% dip in May and a 20.5% drop in June.
Trading thinned into the summer. Spot volume averaged about $5.1 billion a day over the 30-day window, down near 29% from the post-2019 norm, a softness the firm notes has marked June through August in each of the past six years.
Realized volatility fell to 30.4% on an annualized basis, under the trailing-year 43% level and well beneath the long-run average near 81%.
Derivatives flash fear, not panic
VanEck reads the derivatives complex as defensive. The one-month put/call implied volatility skew widened to +11.4 percentage points, an 83rd-percentile mark since 2021, and traders appear content to fund put purchases with the sale of calls.
The firm reads that as fear rather than capitulation. Total options premium eased 23% to $613.6 million, and the put/call premium ratio climbed to 1.49, against an average near 0.71.
Perpetual-futures funding tells a similar story. The rate sits near +4.5% on a 30-day average, about half the long-run +8.4%, a sign that positioning stays far from bullish after a spring stretch in which traders were paid to hold shorts.
VanEck maps both signals to below-average forward returns across the 30-to-180-day window. It flags two markers of a true bottom that have not arrived: a skew past +15 points, or funding that flips negative. Until one appears, the firm sees near-term downside pressure over a quick rebound.
VanEck has pointed to negative funding as a bullish tell in past notes.
Bitcoin ETP outflows and shaken treasury confidence
Demand ran negative on the month, a drop the report ties to exchange-traded product outflows. U.S. spot ETPs shed 40,010 BTC, worth about $2.40 billion, while corporate treasuries added 2,343 BTC and miners kept 1,204 BTC. Exchange balances rose to fill the gap.
The report also charts shaken confidence among digital asset treasuries after Strategy used $1.38 billion to retire convertible notes, a move that left the company with a $900 million reserve and pushed it to its first bitcoin sales since 2022. Those sales, VanEck writes, fed the negative flows across the treasury cohort.
The on-chain picture cuts the other way. The share of bitcoin held longer than a year reached 60.8% of supply, a figure that has climbed through the price drop from 59.1% six months earlier. Another 17.7% of supply sits in the six-to-twelve-month band, coins that graduate into the long-term bucket if they stay put.
VanEck projects the long-term share reaches about 62% in three months and nears 63% in six. Regimes with a long-term share above 60% and rising have lined up with above-average returns across horizons in the firm’s tests, an echo of its prior finding that whales kept holding through the selloff.
Selling, the report finds, concentrates in the middle of the age curve, while the youngest and oldest coins stay still. Profitability metrics run cold, with net unrealized profit at the 17th percentile and 53% of supply in profit against a four-year average of 76%.
Miner economics near multi-year lows
Miner economics form the report’s grimmest section. Network hash rate held near record highs around 930 EH/s as price fell, a mix that pushed implied hashprice to about $30.6 per petahash per second per day, near multi-year lows.
Daily miner revenue averaged $28.5 million, down 39.5% year over year, a level that puts lower-efficiency rigs at or below breakeven. Miner-held bitcoin stayed near 1.785 million, a sign of steady sales of new coins over capitulation.
The pivot to artificial-intelligence hosting runs through the section. VanEck highlights TeraWulf’s 20-year, $19 billion lease with Anthropic and CleanSpark’s $6.6 billion deal as top unlevered yields, part of a build-out the firm has tied to a $50 billion near-term funding gap.
Miner equities have dropped about 42% from 52-week highs on higher rates, a New York pause on data-center construction, and doubt over AI returns.
The firm keeps its conviction, and points to richer contract terms, new AI deals, and hyperscaler spending as reasons the de-rating overstates the risk.
It also notes bitcoin correlation across the group has stepped down, a sign the market prices the names on their own merits. That optimism is not universal across the market; some analysts have argued an AI pivot alone will not rescue struggling miners.
VanEck sees a market that leans toward soft returns over the near term, held back by cautious derivatives and weak miner cash flow, yet supported by a supply base that keeps tightening. For patient holders, the firm writes, the structural picture stays constructive.