Live updates: What's next for bitcoin as it faces headwinds from SpaceX, Fed rates, and Mythos

Anthropic's IPO pipeline, not its new model, is what crypto traders should track.

Markets are retreating in pre-market trading ahead of the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, as investors brace for signs that inflation remains stubbornly elevated.
Risk assets are under pressure, with the Invesco QQQ and bitcoin (BTC) both down more than 1% before the opening bell, reflecting growing concerns that stronger inflation could delay the Federal Reserve's path toward lower interest rates.
Expectations for tighter monetary policy have weighed on gold, which has fallen to $4,169, down over 2% in the past 23 hours, while the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury has climbed back above 4.5% as investors adjust to the prospect of higher rates for longer.

Headline CPI is forecast to rise 4.2% year over year, up from 3.8% in May, which would mark the highest inflation reading since April 2023. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, is expected to increase 2.9% annually, compared with 2.8% previously.

Reflecting these concerns, the CME FedWatch Tool is currently pricing in a 25-basis-point Federal Reserve rate hike by December.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is expected to decline by roughly 11% on June 14, marking the largest downward adjustment since February.

Bitcoin difficulty is a self-regulating mechanism that automatically adjusts every 2,016 blocks, approximately every two weeks, to ensure new blocks continue to be mined at an average rate of 10 minutes, regardless of changes in network computing power.

The anticipated reduction follows a notable decline in bitcoin’s hash rate, which measures the total computational power securing the network. The seven-day moving average of Bitcoin’s hash rate has fallen to around 910 exahashes per second (EH/s), down from its all-time high of 1.1 zettahashes per second (ZH/s) recorded in October.

The decline appears to be driven by multiple factors.

Rising energy costs, partly linked to geopolitical tensions with Iran, have increased miners' operating expenses. At the same time, several publicly listed U.S. mining companies have redirected infrastructure and capital toward artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) businesses.

This shift has reduced the resources dedicated to Bitcoin mining, with some operators scaling back or exiting mining in favor of AI-focused opportunities.

Keel Infrastructure (KEEL), a digital energy and infrastructure company, raised $458 million through a convertible senior notes offering due 2032, generating approximately $445 million in net proceeds. The debt, which carries a 1.25% coupon, provides additional flexibility to fund data center development, equipment purchases, and other growth initiatives as the company pivots toward AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.

Alongside the debt raise, Keel has also been monetizing its bitcoin holdings, selling 269 BTC for approximately $20 million during the first four months of 2026. The Bitcoin sales form part of management's broader strategy to redeploy capital from mining operations into higher-growth digital infrastructure assets.

Oil market panic has sharply cooled in a positive sign for risk assets, including cryptocurrencies.

The CBOE Oil Volatility Index (OVZ) has dropped back to 57.63%. That's exactly where it stood in the final week of February before the Iran war began, according to data source TradingView.

This reverses the dramatic spike above 120% that followed the outbreak of conflict, indicating that energy market fears have largely subsided.

This normalization in oil volatility should provide relief for risk assets previously disrupted by wild energy swings. Bitcoin, however, is moving in the opposite direction, with its 30-day implied volatility (BVIV) surging from 36% to a high of 59% since early last week. The index currently sits around 50%.

Rapid outflows from spot ETFs, Strategy’s BTC sales, and growing unease over inflation and the AI-driven market frenzy have triggered a sharp pullback in bitcoin prices, lifting volatility expectations.

A 5x-leveraged perpetual contract on Hyperliquid, trading under the ticker SPCX, has become the main venue for price discovery ahead of the SpaceX IPO and has fallen about 27% from its mid-May launch.

Despite the slide, SPCX still trades above SpaceX’s fixed $135 IPO price, implying an expected first-day premium of roughly 16%, down from about 60 percent in May

The SPCX contract is a cash-settled derivative with no claim to SpaceX shares, and its recent weakness may reflect broader crypto-market pressure and investors raising cash to participate in the heavily oversubscribed offering.

David Nicholas, CEO and Founder of XFUNDs by Nicholas Wealth and portfolio manager of several actively managed ETFs including BLOX, which maintains bitcoin as a core holding, views the current bitcoin market as technically damaged.

He notes that BTC is trading roughly 20% below its 50-day moving average, a situation he describes as a “broken chart.” This significant deviation has prompted Nicholas to maintain defensive hedges on the position while monitoring for signs of stabilization.

As of writing, bitcoin changed hands near $61,400, with the 50-day simple moving average at $75,020, according to CoinDesk data.

Despite acknowledging oversold conditions that could fuel a short-term bounce, Nicholas remains cautious. According to him, at least a 20% recovery is needed to turn bullish on BTC, yet even that move would still leave price action well below the 200-day moving average.

Other traders have mentioned levels ranging from $68,000 to $80,000 as thresholds that need to be breached for a bull revival.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 on Tuesday, its most capable public model running on Mythos, as it pursues a fall listing it has already filed for confidentially alongside OpenAI, which filed Monday, and SpaceX.

Mythos is Anthropic’s most advanced tier of artificial intelligence models, and Fable is the first publicly released version of this powerful underlying architecture but it comes with strict built-in safety filters.

Bitcoin has spent the past week trading as the high-beta arm of the Nasdaq, sliding with chipmakers and Asian tech as the AI trade unwound. An Anthropic listing, after its $65 billion round at a $965 billion valuation, would hand index funds and retail traders a single AI-lab stock to pile into. Crypto already moves with the AI trade, and giving that trade its own ticker only tightens its grip.

AI-linked tokens caught a modest bid on Fable's launch while bitcoin barely moved, because model releases are narrative for the sector's small caps while the majors now trade on what the AI trade does to risk appetite, not on the models themselves.