Bitcoin, ether ETFs end 13- and 17-day outflow streaks as traders rotate into equity perps ahead of NFP: analysts

Spot bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds broke one of their longest outflow runs since launch on June 4, even as bitcoin held below $63,000 and most digital assets remained under pressure heading into Friday's U.S. jobs report.

U.S. spot bitcoin (BTC) ETFs recorded $3.05 million in net inflows, their first positive day after 13 consecutive sessions of outflows. Meanwhile, spot ether (ETH) ETFs pulled in $19.3 million to end a 17-day outflow streak, according to SoSoValue data.

Spot XRP ETFs added $3.84 million and spot HYPE ETFs drew $12.15 million, while spot SOL ETFs saw a $278,500 net outflow.

Bitcoin is trading near $62,300 on Friday, per , with ether at $1,660.

The ETF reversal comes a day after Standard Chartered global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, told clients the bottom was "almost in," calling the $62,000-to-$64,000 range "the buying zone we all wanted." Meanwhile, Grayscale said bitcoin needs other buyers to find a "sustainable bottom" amid Strategy's recent BTC sale.

Rotation, not recovery

The positive ETF print masked a deeper shift in the direction of crypto-native risk appetite.

Institutional derivatives analytics firm Block Scholes found that BTC and ETH perpetual futures volumes on Hyperliquid had fallen to multi-quarter lows — roughly $2 billion for BTC and $600 million to $700 million for ETH — while equity-index and pre-IPO perpetual contracts on the same platform surged.

The three highest-volume non-crypto perp contracts, a Nasdaq-100 equivalent, an S&P 500 equivalent, and a WTI crude oil tracker, generated $1.3 billion per day in combined volume and $27.1 billion in notional over the past 30 days, equivalent to 112% of Hyperliquid's ETH perp volume, according to Block Scholes research analyst Thahbib Rahman.

Pre-IPO perp volume, led by SpaceX-tracking contracts, jumped from a sub-$5 million daily baseline to upward of $50 million per day.

"The marginal bid that used to support majors has relocated," Rahman wrote, "and a sell-off into that vacuum is the symptom."

He added that the rotation was an attention and marginal-flow shift rather than a dollar-for-dollar equivalence. Rahman noted that the equity-index complex, not pre-IPO perps, was the part of the story most plausibly competing with BTC and ETH for risk budget.

The Strategy signal

Capital.com data added a different lens on the selling. Bitcoin recorded more than $584 million in trading volume and over 433,000 trades in the nine days through June 4, with trade count rising as price fell — a divergence that Capital.com Senior Market Analyst, Daniela Hathorn, called unusual.

"What stands out in our data is that trade count is going up as price goes down," Hathorn said.

The selloff accelerated on June 4 after Strategy's 32 BTC sale disclosure, its first net reduction in years, amplifying the psychological read of the move.

Simon-Peter Massabni, head of business development at XS.com, said the data pointed to a deeper structural shift than routine profit-taking.

He argued the current imbalance between buying and selling forces — with bitcoin entering the market faster than fresh liquidity could absorb it — reflected a genuine contraction in risk appetite among both retail and institutional participants, set against persistently high global bond yields and competition from AI-driven equity flows.

Macro overhang

Wall Street offered a mixed backdrop heading into the weekend.

The Nasdaq slipped roughly 0.2% Thursday after Broadcom's quarterly results, which beat revenue and earnings expectations but left its 2027 AI revenue forecast unchanged — enough to trigger a 14% single-session drop in the chip giant's shares and drag down AMD, Qualcomm, Arm, and Micron.

Kyle Rodda, senior financial market analyst at Capital.com, attributed the session's partial recovery to a rotation rather than a wholesale selloff, aided by a slide in oil prices after U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. and Iran were near a "final" peace agreement.

The more immediate market test arrives with Friday's U.S. non-farm payrolls print. Forecasters expect the U.S. economy added 85,000 jobs in May, keeping the unemployment rate at 4.3%.

Hathorn noted that the reaction function may be more nuanced than usual.

A strong print could revive Federal Reserve rate-hike concerns, while a weak print would raise questions about the durability of growth, especially as equity valuations are already stretched. Futures markets are pricing in slightly better-than-even odds of at least one Fed rate hike before year-end.