Crypto Markets Start June Weak as Bitcoin and Ethereum Dip, While Stellar Lumens, Hyperliquid Rise
Bitcoin and ether start June in the red, dragged down by fresh geopolitical heat as the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire and diplomatic talks collapsed. The CoinDesk 20 Index fell 2% since midnight UTC, with bitcoin hovering around $72,700, negative for six of the last seven days, and ether shedding roughly 1%.
It’s a painful start to a month that typically treats crypto well. According to Coinglass data, bitcoin has historically averaged a 7.4% gain in May, making last month’s 3.5% drop a notable outlier. That slide was compounded by a record 10 consecutive days of net outflows from spot bitcoin ETFs, totaling $2.97 billion, the longest streak on record.
Despite that grim backdrop, derivatives data tell a slightly different story. Bitcoin open interest sits steady at $19.5 billion, funding rates remain mildly positive at 0–10% annualized, and the three-month basis has ticked up from 2.2% to 2.8%, pointing to a quiet but real improvement in institutional risk appetite. Options markets lean modestly bullish, with call volume outpacing puts 61 to 39 in the past 24 hours.
The DeFi corner of the market took a harder hit. The CoinDesk DeFi Select Index dropped 2.6%, with Ondo Finance’s ONDO token down 2.8%, now off 17% since founder Nathan Allman’s sudden death last week.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid’s HYPE token bucked the trend, gaining 1.26% to extend a five-day winning streak that pushed it to an all-time high of $73.94. The token, which only launched ETF products last month, is attracting fresh capital as institutional interest firms up.
The day’s breakout story, however, belongs to Stellar’s XLM. The token surged more than 40% in 24 hours to $0.2862, lifting its market cap above $9.6 billion, following a May 27 announcement that DTCC , Wall Street’s central clearinghouse overseeing more than $114 trillion in assets and processing roughly $2.5 quadrillion in securities transactions annually, will connect its tokenized securities platform to the Stellar network in the first half of 2027. The move makes Stellar the first public blockchain in DTCC’s multichain tokenization strategy, a deal underpinned by the SEC’s December 2025 No-Action Letter authorizing tokenization of real-world assets. Production testing is targeted for July, with wider rollout in October.
The XLM rally wasn’t thin air. Spot turnover hit approximately $2.3 billion on the day, up 34%, and open interest in XLM perpetuals rose nearly 11% to $361 million, signals pointing to genuine fresh demand rather than a short squeeze. XLM outperformed every other top-20 token over the period, breaking out of a monthslong descending channel that had held the token back since late 2025.
U.S. equity futures offered some counterbalance to the crypto gloom, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 micro-futures each adding around 0.2%, reflecting a broader market appetite for risk even as digital assets wobbled.
For now, bitcoin and ether start June in the red, but the underlying structure of derivatives markets, combined with blockbuster developments like the Stellar-DTCC partnership, suggests the broader crypto narrative is far from finished.
