Bitcoin Pulls Back From $78K As Persian Gulf Risk Trumps Institutional Bid

Crypto markets sold off broadly on Thursday as traders booked profits after a week-long rally that had pushed Bitcoin back toward $80,000.

Bitcoin is changing hands at $77,955, down 1.1% over the past 24 hours, though still up 4.5% on the week and 9.9% on the month, according to CoinGecko. Ether slipped 2.8% to $2,331, turning its seven-day chart marginally negative.

Among the rest of the top ten, Solana is trading at $86, down 3% on the day, XRP is off 1.9%, and BNB is down 2% at $636. Total crypto market capitalization fell 1.6% to $2.69 trillion.

Strong ETF Bid

Despite Thursday’s red tape, the broader trend in spot ETF flows remains constructive.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $335 million on Tuesday, per Farside, the seventh consecutive session of positive flows. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) accounted for $246.9 million of the total, with Fidelity’s FBTC adding $56.7 million and Bitwise’s BITB contributing $15.4 million. Cumulative flows across all 11 spot Bitcoin products are now back in positive territory for the year, with total AUM above $96.5 billion.

The flows indicate a notable reversal from the first quarter, when sustained outflows tracked alongside Bitcoin’s slide from above $100,000 toward the mid-$70Ks.

Geopolitical Risks Linger

Bitcoin’s failure to push decisively through $80,000 reflects an unresolved geopolitical overhang. Iran reportedly fired on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, and a U.S. naval blockade in the region remains in place. Although President Trump has framed the current ceasefire as indefinite, peace talks have not progressed, and oil prices remain sensitive to regional headlines.

DeFi Grapples with Kelp Fallout

On-chain markets are still digesting last weekend’s Kelp DAO exploit. LayerZero’s post-mortem attributed the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, which compromised two RPC nodes feeding the bridge’s verifier and minted 116,500 unbacked rsETH before depositing it on Aave as collateral and borrowing real WETH against it.

Aave’s risk service providers have modeled bad debt at between $123.7 million and $230.1 million, depending on how losses are allocated across rsETH holders. The protocol partially unfroze WETH on its Ethereum Core V3 market on Tuesday, and Arbitrum’s Security Council froze roughly $71 million of stolen ETH.