Dollar Strength

All eyes are on the DXY this coming week, as a strong US dollar continues to make life difficult for risk assets, as exemplified by Bitcoin’s struggles and ETH being flipped by USDT on Friday. Today’s forward guidance looks at how bearish factors are bumping up against bullish ones to make current market conditions a nightmare to navigate.

Elsewhere, retail investors now have a way to speculate on stocks that were previously off limits to them, in the form of pre-IPO perpetuals. We look at the accelerating growth of these instruments, where they can be found and how they’re likely to continue growing - unless of course regulators start getting jittery and step in to spoil the fun…

🥧 Slicing the Pie 🥧

Michael Saylor is sweating as Strategy catches strays for selling BTC, while its MSTR and STRC stocks get battered. What’s more, he now has another reason to be looking nervously over his shoulder: BlackRock and Goldman Sachs have launched new Bitcoin income ETFs, and they’re eyeing up a big chunk of the pie Strategy has long had to itself.

For years, Saylor’s company was the primary gatekeeper for institutional Bitcoin exposure. Now, these Wall Street giants offer a safer, yield-generating alternative, systematically dismantling the flywheel that once made Strategy seem invincible. So in today’s video, we look at how Strategy’s woes and the entry of the Street's biggest beasts into the market pose an uncomfortable question: is TradFi finally validating Bitcoin as a mature asset, or is it nudging it into a cage of quarterly dividends? The battle for Bitcoin’s soul is underway.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

This past week, Bitcoin broke below $60,000 for the third time this year. Ethereum is not far behind at $1,580. As noted in previous newsletters, the macro environment has not been kind to risk assets, and the recent cascade of headwinds is now weighing on prices in a way that is becoming difficult to dismiss as temporary noise.

Let's start with the most important development of the past fortnight - the US dollar. The DXY hit its strongest level since May 2025 this week, and historically Bitcoin has an inverse relationship with dollar strength. When the dollar rallies, global liquidity tightens, and risk assets from equities to crypto feel the pressure. It's not just a correlation either: a stronger dollar makes Bitcoin more expensive for buyers outside the United States, compresses the purchasing power of international capital, and signals a risk-off environment more broadly.

Then there’s the ETF picture, which has turned decidedly ugly. BlackRock's IBIT has seen $2.6 billion leave the fund this month alone, the largest monthly outflow since its inception. That is a remarkable reversal for a product that was supposed to represent permanent institutional demand. What it more likely reflects is that the institutions that came in during the late-2025 rally are trimming exposure in response to the same macro signals that are driving the dollar higher and rate expectations more hawkish. On-chain data reinforces this: the Coinbase premium has been negative for 47 consecutive days, meaning US institutional money has been a net seller every single day for over six weeks.

Nowhere is the pressure more visible than in Strategy and its associated securities. MSTR has broken below its lowest level since 2024, and the company's NAV premium has collapsed below one, meaning the market now values Strategy at less than the Bitcoin it holds. That is a remarkable shift for a stock that spent most of the past two years trading at a significant premium to its Bitcoin holdings. Compounding the picture is STRC, Strategy's preferred stock paying an 11.5% annual dividend, which has hit a record low below its $100 par value.

This is where things get interesting, because the bearish signals are starting to stack up against some genuinely significant bullish developments. On the regulatory front, the Clarity Act is closer to passage than it has ever been. The final text is expected to be released over the 4th of July weekend, a committee hearing is scheduled for 17th July, and both the House and Senate have indicated bipartisan support.

It's not just the Clarity Act either. Charles Schwab, which manages $12.6 trillion in assets, this week rolled out Bitcoin trading to retail clients. Morgan Stanley has amended its ETH and SOL ETF filings to reveal the lowest fees in the market. BlackRock has publicly stated it recommends a 1-2% Bitcoin portfolio allocation. These represent the gradual normalisation of crypto as an institutional asset class. The infrastructure is being built even as prices fall.

The question of where the bottom lies is one that nobody can answer with confidence. What the on-chain data does tell us is that this is Bitcoin's shallowest bear market on record by some metrics, with drawdown from peak far less severe than in 2018 or 2022. More than 50% of all Bitcoin supply is currently held at a loss, a level that has historically preceded bottoms. That does not mean the bottom is in today, but it does mean that the structural damage to the underlying investor base is less severe than previous cycles would suggest.

Put simply, there are two forces in direct tension right now. On one side, a hawkish Fed, a strong dollar, persistent ETF outflows, the Strategy overhang, and a bear market price structure. On the other, landmark regulatory progress, accelerating institutional infrastructure, historically shallow drawdown metrics, and a slowly unwinding geopolitical premium.

In sum then, the next few weeks are likely to remain choppy and difficult. The path of least resistance is still lower while the dollar holds up and the Fed keeps threatening hikes. A confirmed Clarity Act signing or a sustained reversal in ETF flows could shift the picture quickly, but neither is imminent. The base case for the coming fortnight is that Bitcoin continues to trade in a range between $57,000 and $64,000, with a deeper flush toward the $50,000 to $54,000 zone remaining possible if macro conditions deteriorate further. We would view that flush, if it comes, as the final capitulation before a meaningful recovery.

📈 Pre-IPO Shadow Market  📈

Pre-IPO perpetuals have been one of the hottest and fastest categories of derivatives recently.

For those unfamiliar, a pre-IPO perpetual is a cash-settled derivative that tracks the anticipated listing price or implied valuation of a private company before it goes public. Imagine being able to trade stocks like Anthropic and OpenAI before they get listed on a stock exchange. That’s exactly what pre-IPO perpetuals let you do.

To be clear, these contracts don’t give you any ownership, voting rights, dividends or claim of any kind against the company they reference. You are not buying a piece of OpenAI. They merely let you bet on a number that other people have agreed to treat as OpenAI's price, settling the difference in stablecoins.

According to CryptoQuant, total pre-IPO perpetual volume reached roughly $12 billion in June, up from around $2 million in March and $715 million in May. If that growth isn’t a sign of a market with insatiable demand, we don’t know what is.

The reason all of this is happening now is the AI valuation mania, which is the single largest demand engine behind the entire trend. After all, who wouldn’t love to bet on AI stocks? Over the past few years, AI has been one of the hottest sectors that many private market investors have been speculating on aggressively. The combined paper value of the three biggest AI players (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) now sits close to $4 trillion. Crunchbase also reported that global venture capital deployed roughly $300 billion across about 6,000 startups in the first quarter alone, with something like 80% of it flowing to AI.

The best part is that the valuation of these private AI companies jumps by leaps and bounds every few months as they raise fresh capital. Notably, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in late May, nearly tripling the $350 billion mark it set just three months earlier in February. Likewise, OpenAI closed its latest round at an $852 billion valuation in March, up from $500 billion just five months earlier.

That said, for the longest time, the average retail investor could not gain exposure to any of these businesses. The private market was gated to a select few wealthy, well-connected investors. The worst part is that companies are also staying private far longer than they used to.

According to one CNBC report, the median age of a company at IPO currently sits at around 13 years. This is a significant jump when you consider that the median age was 10 years in 2018 and roughly 4 years in 1999. This has led to some criticism that regular retail investors can no longer find opportunities like Amazon, which went public in 1997 at a market value of just $438 million and has since grown into a multi-trillion-dollar company, minting fortunes for anyone who bought in early and held on.

The equivalent companies today, the SpaceXs and OpenAIs, are doing the bulk of that growth while still private, which means the public only gets to buy in once the steepest part of the climb is already behind them.

This is the gap that pre-IPO perpetuals claim to close. With that context in mind, it becomes easy to see why they’re seeing such rapid growth. That said, the credit for popularising and scaling this category goes to Hyperliquid, more specifically to its HIP-3 framework, which lets any team permissionlessly deploy a perpetual market by staking 500,000 HYPE.

This design pushed the risky, regulator-adjacent work of listing synthetic private-company markets out to independent builders while Hyperliquid's core handled execution, margining and settlement. Notably, Ventuals launched the first pre-IPO markets on the framework, on names like OpenAI and Anthropic, before Trade.xyz overtook it and came to dominate the category, accounting for somewhere between 95% and 97% of all pre-IPO perps volume on Hyperliquid.

According to The Block, stock-linked markets on HIP-3 have produced more than $18.8 billion in volume in the first half of June alone, eclipsing the $7.66 billion from crude and Brent perps combined. Notably, this is the first time equities have displaced commodities as the dominant builder category on HIP-3. The pre-IPO slice sits inside this equity rotation, sometimes driving a significant portion of volume. Notably, the SpaceX pre-IPO perp on Hyperliquid recorded $1.4 billion in volume on its IPO day, accounting for nearly a third of all HIP-3 activity that session.

That said, while Hyperliquid helped popularise this category, a large chunk of the volume growth and open interest now comes from centralised crypto exchanges. According to a CMC report, Binance and OKX alone account for 82% of cumulative pre-IPO perp volume traded across all venues since November 2025. Hyperliquid, across both Trade.xyz and Ventuals, accounts for roughly 8%. Similarly, data from Coinglass shows that open interest for OpenAI pre-IPO perps currently sits at $6.9M while Anthropic pre-IPO perps currently sit at $9.5M. Across both markets, Binance and OKX account for roughly 70% of the open interest.

It’s also worth noting something else that open interest figure brings to our attention – a market capitalising the most valuable private companies on earth in the trillions is being held up by a few million dollars of actual trader capital. In other words, a handful of fills can move the "valuation" of these private AI behemoths.

This raises the obvious question of whether these markets actually discover anything, or merely generate a number that looks like a price.

On one side, we have Cerebras whose pre-IPO perp almost perfectly predicted its opening price. When the AI chipmaker went public on 14 May, its perp spent the final hour before open trading at around $354. The stock then opened at $350. That’s a gap of just 1.3%. On the other side, we have Quantinuum whose pre-IPO perp ran as high as $90, against an expected IPO price of just $45 to $50. When the company listed on 4th June, the stock opened at $68, closed near $60, and kept sliding the next day.

This shows how these perps are just as risky as they are convenient. While pre-IPO perps pull scattered private-market sentiment into a tradable number, they are by no means an accurate forecast of how the stock will open on its IPO debut.

The risks of trading pre-IPO perps are real. Because you own nothing, there is no share to fall back on if a company never lists or a venue simply shuts down. Gap risk is real as well -  Coinbase's own documentation warns that a 25% IPO-day move can wipe out a position held at 5x leverage entirely. Similarly, any problems with the data provider powering the price oracle of these trading venues can cause massive losses. Notably, Ventuals had to compensate traders earlier this year after its SpaceX perp plunged 45% in a single session, liquidating hundreds of traders after an offchain data provider returned incorrect pricing data.

So, where does this leave the asset class everyone is suddenly talking about?

Well, if you ask us, these markets will likely continue thriving despite the risks. Unless regulators step in, there is no reason for existing centralised incumbents to refrain from offering pre-IPO perps on their platforms. In all likelihood, the pre-IPO perp market will continue growing exponentially as a crypto trading category, especially as altcoins continue to hibernate.

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🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* Bybit vs OKX 2026: Which Crypto Exchange Is Better For You?
* How To Buy Solana Memecoins Safely in 2026
* Trezor Hardware Wallet Review 2026: Safe 3, Safe 5 and Safe 7 Compared
* Ledger Hardware Wallet Review 2026: Is Ledger Still Worth It?
* Best Solana Staking Pools in 2026: Where to Stake SOL Safely
* Changelly Review 2026: Fees, Safety, KYC Risks and Alternatives
* How to Backtest Your Crypto Strategy Without Fooling Yourself

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

"You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don't realize it at the time" - Shelby Cullom Davis

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.