OVERVIEW

A Letter to Everyone Watching Red 👀 

Here’s What’s Happening 👇️

Today’s top trending tickers: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, TRUMP, and Cardano

Biggest winners: $H ( ▲ 5.16% ) , $USDT ( ▲ 0.06% ) , $USDE ( ▲ 0.08% ) , $USDD ( ▲ 0.05% ) , and $USD1 ( ▲ 0.04% )  

Biggest losers: $ZEC ( ▼ 28.26% ) , $NEAR ( ▼ 12.22% ) , $ADA ( ▼ 11.17% ) , $HYPE ( ▼ 6.97% ) , and $TON ( ▼ 7.48% )  

Before we dive in, here’s the total crypto market cap and altcoin market cap charts:

Click to enlarge.

NEWS
Feeling Down? That’s Normal 🫂

Eight months. That’s how long it’s been since the top, and if you’ve held through all of it, you’ve watched half of everything evaporate one daily candle at a time. No single merciful crash. Two hundred and forty-two days of paper cuts.

Punctuated by weeks like this one where the market decides to take a limb instead. But big red days rarely break people.

The big red days at least feel something with a name, something you’ll tell stories about (or spend hours on Suno making funny songs about). The real emotional damage comes from the random Wednesday in month five, when the market drops another 2% and you realize you’ve stopped checking your portfolio out of pure self-preservation rather than discipline.

Like many of you, I’ve been through this more than three times now. People ask if it gets easier. No. It does not get easier. But it does get more familiar.

Not Easier, But Familiar

The first bear market, you think the asset is dying. The second, you think you’re the idiot who came back. By the third, something shifts – you’re like, ‘well, this blows, but crypto is doing that thing again’.

Tops are loud. Bottoms are when the people who put laser eyes on their profile photos quietly take them off and start posting about sourdough recipes and life coaches.

The same -15% week that would have ended you in your first cycle now registers as just another Tuesday. Call it scar tissue. Scar tissue is load-bearing, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Tuition Cost: Temporary Misery

Everyone who has real conviction in this asset class got into it with months exactly like this one, and then it went lower, but they got in again. Conviction never comes from the green years because anyone can hold something when it’s winning.

What I can tell you is that every person who’s been through more than one of these down cycles knows the same thing – the cycle ended every time. Every red streak on record eventually ran out of sellers, usually right around the moment the last hodler stopped making jokes.

So keep making jokes and having fun.

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
The Structural Conviction Index – What Hodlers Are Doing 🧠

With the moves we’ve been seeing, it’s a good time to look at the Structural Conviction Index.

I built the Structural Conviction Index (SCI) because every on-chain metric I used told me where holders were, but nothing told me where they were going. So I took three on-chain metrics (coins aging or waking up, supply leaving or hitting exchanges, whales or retail absorbing float) and scored each against its own recent history.

The SCI tells me whether the hodler base is digging in or heading for the exits, usually before price makes it obvious. Above +50, holders are gripping their coins tighter and there’s less available to buy. Below -50, they’re letting go, and every coin they release needs to find a buyer.

Let’s see what the SCI is saying. 👇️ 

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
Bitcoin Whales Resume Buying, Cite ‘Wanting To Sell It Higher Later’ 🐋

Click to enlarge.

One of three channels bullish. Neutral isn’t boring here – the channels are pulling hard in opposite directions.

Age Migration: Soft again. Dormancy keeps eroding. Not collapsing – eroding.

Custody Migration: Three straight inflow weeks. The six-month ledger still nets -45.5K BTC out, but the recent direction is not what bulls like to see.

Concentration Migration: The whale bid is back. Whale wallets (1K-100K BTC) added 0.445% in 14 days while retail went flat.

The Read: Tug-of-war. Whales are bidding while $BTC ( ▼ 2.97% ) moves to exchanges and dormancy erodes. Someone’s wrong. Neutral composite, no edge until at least two channels agree.

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
ETH Whale Moves Entire Stack Into Staking Contract, Tells Family He’s ‘Earning Yield Now’ 🧐

Click to enlarge.

Composite: All three channels bullish. A month ago this printed -63.9 with age pinned bearish.

Age Migration: May’s sellers finished selling, and what’s left isn’t moving. Post-flush dormancy is building fast.

Custody Migration: Selling pressure is slowing, but it’s not absent yet. The score is positive because that’s a fraction of the +232K and +169K inflow weeks from mid-May.

Concentration Migration: Wallets with 10K-100K $ETH ( ▼ 8.87% ) shed -1% in 30 days while 100K-1M gained 0.8%. ETH is moving up the wallet groupings and into validators, not down to retail. Opposite of May’s pattern.

The Reading: The structure says the May flush was the event – the first five days of June may be ‘catch up’ move to what happened in May, so we’ll have to keep looking closely.

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
The Colonoscopy Crash: Zcash Did the Responsible Thing And Got Punched In The Face 👊 

Oh man, we gotta get the sequence straight here, because crypto social didn’t.

Bug hunter Taylor Hornby found a critical counterfeiting bug in $ZEC ( ▼ 28.26% ) ’s Orchard pool on May 29 and reported it privately the same day. It was patched by June 2, with a hard fork closing it permanently on June 3. Only then did Zcash founder Zooko disclose it publicly.

Twitter tweet

The exploit only ever ran in a local test environment, and Shielded Labs believes prior exploitation is unlikely. Nothing was minted. An exploit did not happen. But people still think something bad happened, and sold Zcash anyway.

It’s like if my wife says, ‘go get your colonoscopy or I’m leaving’ and then I go. The doctor finds polyps and removes them on the spot, and when I come home with the good news about me avoiding death, she shoots me in the head anyway.

Twitter tweet

The market went full Monty Python: weighs the same as a duck, burn her anyway. ZEC fell from $624 to $309 in under 48 hours, and Arthur Hayes dumped his entire bag.

And that’s that.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🏛️ Tokenized Stock Platform Crosses $1B While Wall Street Pretends It Never Made Fun Of This

Ondo’s June 1 update carried weight on two fronts: a remembrance for Nathan Allman, then the note that Ondo Global Markets passed $1 billion in TVL. That milestone matters because tokenized stocks have spent years stuck between “obvious future” and “conference-panel fever dream.” Now the suits are inching closer, carefully, like the blockchain might bite them. Which, to be fair, it often does.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

🥷 DeFi Users Discover Broadcasting Their Net Worth To The Entire Planet May Have Been Suboptimal

Starknet pushed private DeFi through STRK20, letting users shield, swap, lend, and stake without turning their wallet into a public autopsy report. The idea is privacy inside apps and wallets, using Starknet’s ZK-native setup instead of asking users to imagine they’re intelligence agencies.

🦄 Uniswap’s App Adds Normal Human Features, Alarming Users Who Thought Pain Was Part Of The Yield

Uniswap added wallet creation, portfolio P&L, combined multichain balances, and crosschain swaps in one cleaner app flow. This is bad news for the five people who enjoy needing a spreadsheet, three browser tabs, and a small prayer circle to move $42 between chains.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🪲 Aave Pays Bug Hunters, Confirms Security Still Cheaper Than Public Humiliation

Aave Labs posted a request to pay $9,350 for two valid bug bounty submissions and platform fees, including the first payout under the Aave V4 bug bounty program. The report was low severity, which is the good kind of boring, unlike the “we paused the protocol and lawyers are now breathing manually” kind.

OLD NEWS
Crypto Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Time Ago 📜

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter a year ago today:

• Circle’s IPO ripped – opened at $69 vs a $31 IPO price.

• Bitcoin’s big trendline was still the main chart to watch – BTC had slipped below it, keeping the “red June” setup alive.

• The MVRV read was mixed – ETH and LTC looked relatively bullish, BTC looked cautiously fine, while ADA and XRP looked more vulnerable to profit-taking.

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter two years ago today:

• The market looked horrible – the writeup framed it as the worst week since FTX if things didn’t improve by the weekly close.

• Liquidations were brutal – nearly $650M got flushed, with about $530M of that coming from longs.

• The mood was basically “is the low in, or are we just getting tricked again?” – which, honestly, was the right question.

OLD NEWS
Other Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Ass Time Ago ⌛️

June 5

• 1849 – Denmark becomes a constitutional monarchy.

• 1873 – Under a treaty with Great Britain, Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar closes the great slave market.

• 1883 – The first Orient Express departs Paris.

• 1916 – The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire begins.

• 1956 – Elvis shakes his hips. Suggestively.

• 1967 – The Six -Day War begins.

• 1989 – the Tank Man halts tanks at Tiananmen Square.

• 2017 – Montenegro becomes the 29th member of NATO.

• 1968 – Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated.

• 2025 – The Nintendo Switch 2 is released.

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLD, NEAR, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋