Bitcoin's Bear Market Is the Shallowest Ever

Plus: 🛡️ Aave proposes a binding risk framework after KelpDAO | 💰 Morpho raises $175M in DeFi's biggest round | 🏦 Janus Henderson takes a direct ENA position

June 10, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 📉 Bitcoin's current drawdown is breaking a pattern that held through every prior cycle, and analysts disagree on what it means

  • 🛡️ The largest DeFi lending protocol just proposed a binding answer to the exploit that nearly broke it

  • 💰 The biggest DeFi funding round to date just closed, and three of crypto's most influential VCs led it together

  • 🏦 A $480 billion traditional asset manager just took a direct token position in a synthetic dollar protocol

Bitcoin's 50% Drop Is the Shallowest Bear Market Ever

Bitcoin trades around $62,593, down roughly 50% from its October 2025 all-time high of $126,080. That makes the current drawdown the shallowest bear market in Bitcoin's history.

Every prior cycle ran deeper corrections. The 2012 bear market drawdown exceeded 90%, the next two cycles hit 82%, and the 2022 cycle bottomed at 74%. Analysts attribute the compression to institutional ownership, ETFs, and deeper liquidity reshaping who holds Bitcoin.

Whether the bottom is in is another question. Jeff Ko of CoinEx, Martin Lee of DWF Labs, and Alex Tsepaev of B2PRIME all told Decrypt the bear market has further to run, pointing to ETF outflows and macro tightening. Both Ko and Tsepaev flagged $60,000 as the first key level, with a bearish retest of $55,000 to $45,000 if selling continues.

Why BTC Really Fell

Why did Bitcoin really fall? It wasn't Saylor's 32 BTC sale — a rounding error at 0.0038% of Strategy's stack — and it wasn't the Mt. Gox wallet that moved 10,422 BTC to cold storage without selling a coin.

In the new Bits + Bips premium release, Jeff Albus breaks down the liquidity signal that called this leg down months in advance, why the four-year cycle was never just about the halving, and the one onchain line that has marked every prior bear-market bottom — and still hasn't fired.

Plus: bull, base, and bear cases with explicit price targets, and six signals to watch from here.

Blame MSTR for the Bitcoin Crash? The Culprit May Lie Elsewhere - Unchained

Strategy disillusionment, phantom whales, the AI boom; everyone has a finger to point when it comes to crypto’s recent price crashout.

Unchained • Jeff Albus

Aave Proposes Binding Risk Framework After KelpDAO

Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced Tuesday that a new risk framework has been proposed for the protocol, the first structural governance response to April's $292 million KelpDAO bridge exploit.

The proposal, prepared by LlamaRisk, is binding across Aave V3, V4, and Aave Horizon at onboarding, at every quarterly due diligence refresh, and at every parameter or deprecation decision. It is organized into four layers: asset risk, bridging risk, monitoring and automated risk oracle systems, and chain risk.

Among the concrete requirements: a minimum $50,000 bug bounty floor for critical findings, at least three independent verifiers on any bridge carrying Aave exposure, and automated freeze guardians built on Chainlink infrastructure that can tighten exposure without waiting for human review.

Morpho Raises $175M at $2B Valuation in DeFi's Biggest Round

Morpho raised $175 million in a funding round co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Ribbit Capital, the Morpho Association announced Tuesday. The protocol called it one of the largest decentralized finance rounds to date.

Strategic participants include Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck, and Ledger Cathay, plus Variant, Wintermute Ventures, Prelude, IOSG, Hashkey, Mirana, NJJ Capital, SBI Group, and Bpifrance. It is Morpho's fourth institutional raise since 2021.

The capital will deepen technical and commercial integrations and build infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and asset managers. Morpho has more than $11 billion in deposits and is used by Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Bitwise, Galaxy, and Anchorage Digital. Fortune reported the round valued Morpho at up to $2 billion.

Janus Henderson Takes ENA Position, Plans USDe ETFs

Janus Henderson, the $480 billion asset manager, made a strategic investment in Ethena's governance token ENA and plans to use USDe for treasury cash management, the firms announced Tuesday.

The two also plan to explore regulated investment products tied to USDe and ENA, including exchange-traded products for Janus Henderson clients. Ethena will allocate and help distribute Janus Henderson's tokenized funds of collateralized loan obligations.

"We believe very deeply that innovation in blockchain is being led by the DeFi community," Nick Cherney, head of innovation at Janus Henderson, told CoinDesk. The deal follows last week's Coinbase Ventures investment in Ethena and mirrors BlackRock's UNI position and Apollo's Morpho deal earlier this year. ENA fell 8% over 24 hours as crypto markets slid.

⏰ UNEASY MONEY LIVE 📢

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 is the most capable public AI ever released — and it's refusing to audit smart contracts, days after its predecessor found a four-year-old bug in Zcash's shielded pool that survived multiple expert audits.

Kain, Taylor, and Luca dig into what AI security gatekeeping means for DeFi, plus Humanity Protocol's $32M laptop disaster.

Live today at 5pm ET.

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  • 🟧 Circle debuted cirBTC on Ethereum, directly challenging Coinbase's cbBTC in the wrapped bitcoin market. The product offers institutional-grade BTC-backed exposure with Circle's regulated custody as the issuer.

  • 📋 Kalshi will require traders to disclose their employers in sensitive markets to curb insider trading, alongside new risk scoring and a whistleblower program. The move is the platform's most direct policy response to the George Santos State of the Union trading case.

  • 🔒 Starknet rolled out a ZK privacy layer for ERC20 balances and transfers, enabling shielded transactions for arbitrary tokens directly on the L2 without third-party privacy protocols.

  • 🏛️ Backpack U.S. appointed former SEC Acting Chairman Michael Piwowar to its board of directors as the exchange pushes for US crypto perpetuals approvals. Piwowar served as SEC Acting Chairman in early 2017.

  • 🏦 GSR received FINRA approval to complete its broker-dealer acquisition, clearing the regulatory path for the market-making firm to expand into US securities-related crypto trading.

  • ⚽ Kraken was named the official crypto exchange of the FIFA World Cup 2026, becoming the first major crypto sponsorship at the tournament hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico.

  • ⚖️ House Ways and Means Committee heard pushback on crypto tax bills during Tuesday's markup, with lawmakers questioning the de minimis exemption thresholds and the treatment of staking rewards. The bills remain a work in progress.

  • 🔐 Zodia Custody secured a Luxembourg payment institution license to expand EU stablecoin services, joining the regulated stablecoin payments build-out under MiCA.

  • 🇯🇵 SBI Shinsei Bank plans a crypto rewards program for depositors this fall, according to Nikkei. The product would let Japanese bank customers earn bitcoin and other crypto on deposit balances.

  • 🇬🇧 The UK Financial Conduct Authority proposed allowing mutual funds 10% exposure to crypto ETNs in its Q2 quarterly consultation paper. The change would open UK retail mutual fund flows to crypto for the first time.

  • 📊 Vinyl Equity raised $20 million, led by Jump Capital, to scale its transfer agent software platform. The infrastructure underpins corporate stock registries and is positioning for the tokenized equity transition.