#Gate广场五月交易分享 Exchange reserves drop to a seven-year low, with 270K BTC whales net buying to compress circulating float—Is $80K support or a trap?

The US spot Bitcoin ETF has recorded nine consecutive days of net inflows, totaling about $2.7 billion, with a single-day inflow of $629 million on May 1st being one of the strongest daily data points in 2026. The core significance of this liquidity event is not optimism in sentiment, but structural supply compression: each ETF net inflow is actually authorized participants buying BTC from the spot market and transferring it to the issuer for custody, causing the assets to exit tradable circulating supply. Coupled with exchange reserves dropping to the lowest since December 2017, at 2.21 million BTC, the market’s core contradiction today is not the direction, but whether the price can be sustained by ongoing spot trading volume support amid extremely compressed floating supply, or whether this rally has already exhausted the short-term squeeze potential.

On the external liquidity side, macro pressures have not dissipated but have eased marginally. US Secretary of State Blinken’s comments on the Strait of Hormuz military situation pushed the dollar and oil prices lower, with BTC rebounding to $81,600. This indicates that BTC’s current short-term correlation with the dollar index remains significantly negative. However, this correlation is inherently fragile—cryptocurrency markets have a 30-day correlation coefficient of up to 84% with the S&P 500 and 87% with gold. This is not de-correlation but an amplifier of macro sentiment. On the stablecoin front, the total market cap of stablecoins reached a historic peak of $315-316 billion in Q1 2026. Capital has not left but remains in a defensive posture within dollar-pegged instruments, providing ammunition for subsequent rotations, but at this moment, there are no signs of large-scale rebalancing from stablecoins into spot BTC.