Major haul

In the past 24 hours, amidst risk-offloading in Asia, the price of spot Bitcoin fell from about $68,300 to below $67,000.

Monday saw $65 million worth of outflows from ETFs tied to the spot price of the largest crypto which only days ago shot up to nearly $72,000, within a sight line of the all-time high of $73,700.

Dip-buyers of the world take heart, because as it turns out fund flows have been eyeball-bulgingly robust lately. Prior to yesterday, there hadn't been any daily net outflows for U.S.-listed spot BTC products since May 23. And just last week, says CoinShares, total crypto investment products garnered nearly $2B worth of inflows, extending a five-week run of $4.3B.

BlackRock's IBIT became the largest BTC ETF last week, amassing more than $20B since its January debut (CoinDesk).

Institutions are said to be behind this late spring crypto product splurge.

Shares in technology titan Apple (AAPL) fell in pre-market trading on Tuesday following the debut of "Apple Intelligence," the iPhone maker's better-late-than-never foray into AI, partly enabled by a partnership with OpenAI.

Some analysts hailed the start of useful AI applications for the benefit of everyday people. On the other hand, Elon Musk, a mogul with his fingers in many pies, including a rival AI system to OpenAI, panned Apple's plans as a security debacle waiting to happen were the company to proceed with an integration of OpenAI into its operating system, although for now it seems the Apple-OpenAI partnership is non-exclusive and will start off as just basically free ChatGPT for those users who opt-in. The upshot here seems to be that digital assistant Siri is getting an upgrade.

Expectations for Apple's suite of AI offerings (largely developed in-house) have been growing since mid-May so there's seemingly some selling of the news happening here; and it's spilling over into the digital asset domain.

Checking on some of the biggest, better-known "AI coins," we find Fetch.ai (FET) having declined 20% in the past week. Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) lost 19% in that same span as did SingularityNET (AGIX). Well, you won't have FET, OCEAN and AGIX to kick around much longer; by the end of this week, the three coins are set to complete a merger to form Artificial Superintelligence, a unified, blockchain-based AI network built around a new crypto, ASI.

Meanwhile, there is a pause in meme mania. "Roaring Kitty" has been muted to a mere meow after GameStop (GME) shares fell again yesterday following a gouging on Friday. A Solana-run coin, calling itself GME in a opportunistic nod to the video game retailer, tanked by 15% in the past day. GME has a market capitalization of barely $100M. 

Scanning larger-sized, amphibian-based assets, we find a less-battered duo of Pepe (PEPE), down 2%, and Brett (BRETT), down 8%. BRETT remains up 35% over the past week.

PEPE has a market capitalization of more than $5B, placing it in CoinGecko’s Top 30. Cousin BRETT’s market cap is now $1.5B, making it the No. 69 coin.

Total assets in digital investment funds last week surged above $100 billion for the first time since March. The pending approval of spot Ethereum ETFs in the U.S. could trigger a fresh deluge of buying which in turn could fuel an ETH rally of unprecedented proportions; investors are already snapping up shares of funds tied to Ether futures and doing so at a steadier clip (CoinDesk).

As heady as crypto product flows have been recently, market observers theorize that the hot stream is coming from institutions deploying "non-directional basis trades," or those involving agnostic, simultaneous buying and selling of underlying assets and derivatives, so as to capture small, fleeting pricing discrepancies among instruments, as opposed to straight-up bullish bets.