Bitcoin’s recent bounce above $70,000 is starting to look like more than a price bounce. An interesting on-chain analysis of on-chain data points to a change in how capital is moving across the market, with money that previously rotated into stablecoins beginning to edge back into Bitcoin. 

That change is still small, but it is arriving as BTC recently reached an intraday high of $73,720 and as macro fears tied to the US-Iran conflict are changing.

The Defensive Phase Is Starting To Fade

Bitcoin’s market structure has been telling a story of restraint for many months. Capital moved to the sidelines, and stablecoins got bigger. Notably, the Bitcoin realized cap, a measure of the aggregate cost basis of all coins in circulation, plunged deep into negative territory, which is a sign that the market had absorbed significant unrealized losses. 

This Bitcoin realized cap is the premise of the capital rotation setup, which was shared in a technical analysis by a crypto analyst that goes by the name Darkfost.

At the end of February, Bitcoin’s realized cap change fell to about negative $28.7 billion, which is one of the signs that capital tied to the cryptocurrency had moved into a deeply defensive posture. At the same time, stablecoin market capitalization grew by more than $6 billion, showing that investors were moving funds still in the crypto market instead of keeping that exposure in Bitcoin. According to the analyst, it was the first time this kind of rotation had appeared since the last bear-market phase.

However, the tide may be quietly changing, and the timing of that change has not gone unnoticed. Darkfost’s updated reading shows Bitcoin’s realized cap change recovering to about negative $3 billion, while stablecoin capitalization has fallen to around negative $1 billion. 

This means that capital that had been parked on the sidelines appears to be moving back out of shelter and into Bitcoin again. The move is not large enough yet to call it a full risk-on reversal, but it does suggest that investor positioning is no longer as defensive as it was just weeks ago.

Capital Rotation Net Position Change

Price Action And ETF Flows Support The Recovery Story

Perhaps the most striking element of this observation is the timing. The early stages of capital re-exposure to Bitcoin began when geopolitical tensions had not been fully resolved.

US Spot Bitcoin ETFs received $471.32 million in net inflows on April 6 alone, the strongest single day in almost three months, precisely as global markets were absorbing the uncertainty of a US-Iran ceasefire deadline. Bitcoin is currently trading near $71,746, after reaching an intraday high of $73,720, which keeps it close to a sustained recovery in the new week.

If capital keeps rotating out of stablecoins and back into BTC, then the on-chain setup suggests the recovery rally may have room to continue.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView

The News Media Guild, the union that represents AP journalists, said more than 120 staff members received buyout offers on Monday.

The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion’s share of AP’s revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income.

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, said in an interview.

Despite changes – the company has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 – remnants of a staffing structure built largely to provide stories to newspapers and broadcasters in individual states have remained.

That has its roots well back in American history; the AP was started in the mid-19th century by New York newspapers looking to share the costs of reporting outside their immediate territory.

Exact numbers of staff reduction unclear

The number of AP journalists who will lose jobs is murky, in part intentionally. The AP does not say how many journalists it employs, though it has a large international presence as well as its U.S. staff. Pace said the AP’s goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%.

Since buyouts are being offered now to only U.S. journalists, it stands to reason that the cut among that workforce will be more than 5%. Whether there are layoffs depends on how many people take the offer, Pace said.

“The AP employs hundreds of talented journalists who are willing and able to adjust to the changing media landscape,” the union said in a statement. “However, the company refuses to offer them appropriate training and tools. Instead, AP continues to get rid of experienced staff and flirt with artificial intelligence — ignoring the opportunity to differentiate AP news stories as ones that are and always will be created by human journalists.”

The union said AP ignored a request last week to bargain over artificial intelligence. The news outlet had no immediate comment on that claim, or the union’s estimate of how many people were offered buyouts. It’s not clear whether the buyout offers were concluded by Monday afternoon.

Over the past four years, the AP’s revenue from newspapers has declined by 25%. Gannett and McClatchy, two of the largest traditional newspaper publishers, dropped AP in 2024.

In recent days, the company learned that Lee Enterprises — publishers of newspapers like The Buffalo News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Richmond Times-Dispatch — is seeking an early exit from a contract due to expire at the end of 2026.

Pace said the buyout plan was in the works before learning about Lee Enterprises. “We made a decision earlier this year that we needed to be bolder in this transformation,” she said.

An even higher focus on the day’s biggest stories

Besides the transition to more video capabilities, the AP is deploying rapid-response teams where staff members, no matter their geographic base, contribute to the day’s big stories, she said. The AP is putting more journalists on beats to break news on topics of known customer interest. But it is committed to maintaining a presence in all 50 states.

“The AP is not in trouble,” Pace said. “We’re making these changes from a position of strength but we’re doing so now to recognize our changing customer base.”

Those customers now are dominated by broadcast, digital and technology companies, an illustration of where people are getting news. The AP has seen 200% growth in revenue from technology companies over the last four years, said Kristin Heitmann, senior vice president and chief revenue officer.

The AP was among the first news outlets to make a deal with an AI company, agreeing in 2023 to lease part of its text archive to OpenAI as it built out its capabilities. The AP launched on Snowflake Marketplace last year to license data directly to enterprises building their own system. It has launched AP Intelligence, a division designed to sell data to financial and advertising sectors, for example.

Google contracted with AP last year to deliver news through the Gemini chatbot, the tech giant’s first deal with a news publisher.

“If you can think of a large technology company,” Heitmann said, “they are a customer of ours.”

Predictions markets now part of the picture for AP

Last month, the AP agreed to sell U.S. elections data to Kalshi, the world’s largest predictions market.

AP’s long tradition in counting and analyzing elections data is another growth area; the company saw a 30% increase in customers between the 2020 and 2024 cycles. It got an additional boost last year when ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN signed on to the service.

The company, traditionally a wholesaler of news to other companies, has also seen growing interest in its direct-to-consumer product, apnews.com, which provides revenue through advertising and donations.

The new business frontiers do not indicate a weakening in the AP’s standards of providing fast, accurate, non-biased news, leaders said. “It anything, it makes it more important that we retain these values as we make the transition,” Pace said.

The AP is trying new forms of fact-checking, including use of video, and more often putting its journalists in public to explain how they got particular stories, she said.

“I think that authenticity, and the fact that you can associate a real person who is often quite experienced and quite deep on their beats … it builds more credibility,” she said. “We’re really trying to embrace that because I do think it’s vital when there is so much misinformation out there.”

Luis von Ahn, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the language-learning app, revealed on Phoebe Gates’ and Sophia Kianni’s The Burnouts podcast how a job candidate treats their driver from the airport to the office can make or break their chances of getting hired—regardless of how impressive their résumé looks or how much they like the candidate in the interview process.

Entrepreneur von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled a time when the company had been seeking a chief financial officer “for like a year.” The candidate had a strong résumé and the entire hiring committee “really liked,” he told The Burnouts in a February interview. 

But “it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire them.” 

The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market cap of $4.65 billion, knew this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring. 

“Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them,” he said. 

It’s particularly important to Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ahn have leaned into AI. Last April, von Ahn said he was getting rid of contract employees and replacing them with AI. 

“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in a memo posted to LinkedIn in April 2025. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”

While von Ahn’s taxi-driver test is an unconventional interview test, candidates in today’s brutal job market are being evaluated in ways they may not even realize.

A job market where every detail counts

His approach comes at a time when landing a job has never felt more grueling. Hiring in tech has slowed drastically, with job postings down an estimated 36% from pre-2020 levels, according to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 people working in tech have been laid off so far this year, Layoffs.fyi data shows.

Plus, interview processes have become much longer and more involved. Candidates routinely face five to eight interview rounds, panel presentations, case studies, and personality assessments before receiving an offer. The average time-to-hire in the U.S. is approximately 36 days from job posting to offer, according to research by Alex Benjamin, vice president of talent acquisition at OnPoint Consulting Services.

And on top of that, culture and character evaluations have quietly become a standard part of the process—even when candidates don’t know they’re being assessed.

Other CEOs with unorthodox hiring tactics

Duolingo’s CEO isn’t alone in looking beyond a résumé and interview to look for character signals. 

Trent Innes, the former managing director of accounting platform Xeno, and now chief growth officer at SiteMinder, told The Ventures podcast in an episode published in September 2024 he uses a coffee-cup test to evaluate candidates.

When a job candidate arrives for an interview, the interviewer walks them to the kitchen for a beverage. 

“Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?” Innes said. 

For anyone who leaves their dirty cup behind after the interview and doesn’t offer to take it back to the kitchen, it’s a no-go.

“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup,’” he said.

Even without odd tests, several big-name CEOs are vocal about how important street smarts and attitude are to securing a job. Amazon built its hiring process around its core Leadership Principles, with interviewers trained to probe for red flags, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been outspoken about valuing street smarts and intellectual curiosity over pedigree alone.

“I care how you deal with our tellers, our guards, and our receptionists as much as I care how you deal with CEOs,” Dimon said in a July 2024 interview with LinkedIn. “It’s those 300,000 people that matter, and we have to set up right for everybody.”

The Iran war is already taking a toll on major economies around the world, according to business surveys on Tuesday which showed how a surge in energy prices and rising uncertainty were dampening activity and pushing inflation expectations higher.

The initial findings of questionnaires sent to purchasing managers at companies in the United States, Europe and Japan are the most comprehensive snapshot yet of the economic impact of the near four-week conflict that has shut off indefinitely a large chunk of the world’s energy supplies.

The ensuing leap in the price of oil, gas and other related products is a potential double whammy for economies around the world, feeding through into wider inflation and stunting growth.

Beyond the trouble that spells for leaders of those economies – including U.S. President Donald Trump himself – it has already prompted many of the world’s central banks to envisage tighter policy to keep a lid on price pressures.

Among ⁠the 21 economies that share the euro currency, private sector growth all but stalled this month as companies signalled an increase in delivery times and expectations of rising costs that they in turn would be trying to pass on.

S&P Global said its flash euro zone composite Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to a 10-month low of 50.5 in March, below expectations, from 51.9 in February. A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the private sector.

Measures for both input and output prices in euro area manufacturing showed much sharper moves. Within the national readouts, business confidence dropped markedly among French firms while German private sector growth slowed to a 3-month low.

Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said the euro area numbers were “ringing stagflation alarm bells”, referring to the risk of a painful combination of stagnation amid rising prices.

S&P Global’s U.S. survey painted a similar picture of the world’s largest economy, with higher energy prices raising inflation fears amid weaker business sentiment that pointed to weaker private sector employment prospects.

Its flash U.S. Composite ⁠PMI Output Index fell to 51.4 this month. That was the lowest level since last April and followed a 51.9 reading in February and marked two straight monthly falls. The drop this month was in the services sector.

Other Group of Seven (G7) economies fared little better. In Britain, S&P Global’s survey showed business activity growing at the slowest pace in six months while manufacturers’ input costs accelerated at the fastest rate since 1992.

In Japan, the flash composite PMI combining manufacturing and services activities dropped to 52.5 in March from 53.9 in February, its slowest rise in ⁠three months.

Outside the G7, India – which sources roughly 90% of its crude and nearly half its natural gas from abroad – saw its private-sector growth hit a three-year low in March with input costs rising at their fastest pace since June 2022, in part passed on by firms who also saw their margins compressed.

So far, few economists are talking about the war plunging the ⁠global economy into outright recession, even as the energy shock from the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz – through which around a fifth of the world’s oil passes – deepens.

“The scenario is very dependent on the duration of the conflict and on the outlook for energy prices,” said Nicola Nobile of Oxford Economics, commenting on ⁠the euro area impact.

That said, there is a growing realisation that the economic consequences will not be short-lived, given the damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf region inflicted by Iranian strikes in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli missile attacks.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development think tank said last week it was too early to quantify the impact of the conflict on global growth but cited a “significant level of downside risk” for the global economy.

Source: Reuters

– Agencies

Russia on Sunday began direct commercial flights to North Korea, in a further sign of closer ties with its Asian ally helping its offensive in Ukraine.

Shares of Bajaj Finance will be in focus on Monday, June 16, as they begin trading on an ex-split and ex-bonus basis following the company’s recently announced corporate actions.

Investors who held the stock as of Friday, June 13, will be eligible to receive both the split shares and the bonus allotment.

As per the company’s corporate announcement, Bajaj Finance is executing a stock split in the ratio of 1:2, meaning each share with a face value of Rs 2 will be split into two shares of Rs 1 each. In addition to the split, the company is also issuing bonus shares in a 4:1 ratio, entitling shareholders to receive four additional shares for every one share held.

The record date for determining eligible shareholders is Monday, June 16, but due to the T+1 settlement cycle, investors had to purchase shares on or before Friday, June 13 to qualify for the benefits.

To understand the impact, if an investor held 50 shares of Bajaj Finance before the record date, they would first receive 200 bonus shares (4 for each existing share), taking the total to 250.

These 250 shares would then be split in a 1:2 ratio, resulting in 500 shares in total post-corporate action.However, while the number of shares increases, the overall investment value remains the same, as the market price adjusts proportionally.

Bajaj Finance share price history

Over the past one year, the shares of Bajaj Finance have gained 28%, while the year-to-date (YTD) return stands at 34.56%. In the last six months, the stock has risen by 29.89%, and over the three-month period, it has delivered a 10.87% return. On a one-month basis, the stock is up 3.22%.

On Friday, the shares of Bajaj Finance closed flat at Rs 9,334.15 on the BSE.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)