Crypto Market Update: Bithumb Equity Deals and Ethereum Accumulation Trends
According to Coinspot's June 29 market overview, Bitcoin opened in a tight range near $59,791 with a 24-hour spread of $58,856 to $60,432, while Ethereum sat at $1,577.
The structural story is positioning, not price action: a Korean brokerage is taking equity in a domestic exchange, a public treasury is back to accumulating ETH, and a legacy zk-rollup is exiting its DEX business entirely.
Price Tape
BTC's realized range under $1,600 on the day signals compressed volatility and no directional conviction from either side of the book. ETH at $1,577 trades roughly two-thirds below the $4,500–$5,000 recovery zones floated across prediction desks, including a $5,000 call for 2026 from Tom Lee. Top-10 weekly performance stayed net negative despite isolated altcoin bounces, so the breadth still does not confirm a trend reversal.
Institutional Flows
Kiwoom Securities is negotiating an equity position in Bithumb — South Korea's second-largest crypto exchange — via new share issuance. Deal size and final stake remain undisclosed. The structure, a brokerage buying into exchange infrastructure rather than building a venue from scratch, mirrors the convergence pattern already visible across Asian financial groups entering crypto through equity rather than greenfield operations.
Sharplink returned to active ETH accumulation after an eight-month pause. The firm bought approximately $62.4 million of ETH over the trailing week, with the latest tranche executed OTC rather than on lit venues. OTC execution means the bid does not surface as aggressive limit-order flow on spot books, so slippage for retail flow stays contained. The buying aligns with Sharplink's support for Ethlabs, a new nonprofit the firm is developing alongside Bitmine and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. Dollar volume is meaningful, but the signal is treasury allocation, not market-making demand.
Loopring Exits Its DEX
Loopring is winding down its decentralized exchange and AMM. The team cited three gaps: no virtual machine, limited composability, and insufficient payment-rail use cases. The project raised $45 million in a 2017 ICO and was an early live implementation of zk-rollup scaling on Ethereum. The shutdown reads as competitive displacement — zkSync, Scroll, and StarkNet absorbed the developer mindshare and order flow — rather than a failure of the rollup thesis itself. For altcoin liquidity maps, this removes one L2 venue and concentrates residual flow among the remaining rollup ecosystems.