#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 in 2026. This liquidity event's core significance is not optimism in sentiment, but structural supply compression: each ETF net inflow is essentially authorized participants buying BTC from the spot market and transferring it to the issuer for custody, with assets immediately exiting 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 if this rally has already exhausted short-term squeezing space.
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, indicating 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 defensively in dollar-pegged instruments, providing ammunition for subsequent rotations, though no large-scale signals of shifting from stablecoins to spot BTC have been observed at this moment.