Bitcoin Slides to $62K as AI Trade Unwinds; HYPE Drops 14%

Bitcoin slid to $62,715 in Asian hours on Friday, down 1.9% on the day and 14.5% on the week, as the artificial-intelligence trade that has powered global risk assets through 2026 ran out of breath. Ether dropped a sharper 4.8% to $1,696 and is now down more than 15% on the week, while Solana fell 5.4% to $66.51, taking its seven-day loss to 18.5%. The usual suspects all caught the same cold.

The selloff was led from outside crypto. Broadcom's quarterly AI-chip outlook missed elevated expectations on Wednesday, pausing a months-long advance in semiconductor stocks from their war-driven lows. Nasdaq 100 futures slipped 0.9% on Friday, extending the index to a third straight day of declines. South Korea's KOSPI, the best-performing major equity index this year and the cleanest tape on the AI buildout, tumbled 4.7%, with chipmaker SK Hynix off 8%. MSCI's Asia-Pacific equities gauge fell 1.4%.

Currency markets carried their own stress signal. The Korean won extended a slide to a 2009 low. The Indonesian rupiah traded near its record low against the dollar as foreign investors yanked billions from local bond markets. The Indian rupee bucked the trend after the Reserve Bank of India announced fresh measures to attract capital inflows. The picture across Asia is a coordinated risk-off shift that's been quietly building all week.

Crypto sat squarely inside that picture. Hyperliquid's HYPE, which had been the only top-10 token holding green on a weekly basis, dropped 14.8% to $62.14, erasing nearly all of its recent outperformance and leaving only a thin 1.5% gain on the week. The narrative that high-cash-flow tokens were rotating into a bid while the rest of crypto bled lasted less than a single trading session. Zcash, the other lone green dot from yesterday's leaderboard, has now given back its weekly outperformance and then some. The throne of outperformance is, as ever, a precarious seat.

The structural backdrop hasn't softened. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs have now logged 13 straight sessions of net outflows totaling roughly $4.4 billion since mid-May. Strategy filed its first disclosed bitcoin sale since 2022 earlier this week, offloading 32 BTC to fund preferred stock dividend obligations. Combined, those two flows have removed a structural bid that supported bitcoin through most of the past 18 months. The marginal buyer, such as it was, has quietly stepped aside.

The next test is Friday's U.S. nonfarm payrolls report. A soft print would revive expectations for Federal Reserve cuts under newly confirmed chair Kevin Warsh, push real yields lower and likely send the AI trade back up, taking crypto with it. A hot print does the opposite. Until the data lands, the path of least resistance for both stocks and crypto is the one they're already on.