BTC — the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust — has given back the bounce documented in last week's note, falling 5.1% on the week and 17.8% over the past month to close at $27.56, tracking Bitcoin's renewed weakness.
The borrow market remains emphatically loose, which is the clearest signal about how institutional players view this pullback. Availability has actually expanded further over the past week, rising roughly 46% to reach 9,175% — meaning the lending pool holds more than 16.5 million shares against a short position of just 543,000. Cost to borrow has collapsed to 0.45%, down more than 54% on the week and at the lowest level in the 30-day window. With borrow this cheap and supply this abundant, the selling pressure is almost certainly coming from long holders exiting, not from short sellers building positions.
Short interest itself tells a similarly low-conviction story. At just 0.50% of the free float, shorts carry almost no structural weight here. The month-on-month headline figure looks striking — short shares have risen 76% from late May — but that move came entirely from the June 10 spike to around 1.1 million shares, which has since fully unwound. The short score has drifted back down to 26.4, near its lowest level of the past two weeks, confirming the spike was transient rather than the start of a new positioning trend.
Options traders are equally relaxed. The put/call ratio is running at 0.32, fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.33 and close to neutral. The z-score of –0.45 signals no meaningful tilt toward downside protection. That near-total absence of defensive options activity, combined with the loose borrow conditions, suggests the current price decline is being absorbed without unusual hedging demand.
The question heading into next week is whether the price weakness in Bitcoin itself starts to shift any of these conditions — specifically whether cost to borrow firms back up or availability begins to tighten from its current extreme-loose levels.
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