Bitcoin Crashes To $59K As Fed Fears, ETF Outflows, And AI Capital Rotation Bite

Bitcoin price kept bleeding on Friday, recording lows near $59,000 — the lowest level since October 2024, almost two years later. The downturn triggered massive long liquidations and stirred the kind of FUD that makes CT timelines briefly unrecognizable.

At press time, BTC was trading at $59,517.46, down 6.84% in the last 24 hours. CoinGlass data showed $549.80 million in total liquidations over the past day, with long liquidations accounting for $444.27 million of that figure — automated selling of overleveraged longs doing what it always does.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs have now notched 14 sessions of outflows, with nearly $5 billion in negative flows adding meaningful sell pressure. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen described it as a key factor in the latest market bloodbath, which is a polite way of saying things got ugly.

The U.S. jobs data made it worse. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported non-farm payrolls at 172,000 for May 2026, comfortably above the Wall Street estimate of 85,000, while unemployment held steady at 4.3%. Stronger-than-expected employment has a funny way of spooking risk assets when the market wanted rate cuts instead. Bitcoin fell from $62,500 to $59,000 in short order.

Per BNP Paribas, the print could tee up around three Fed rate hikes, which is roughly three more hikes than crypto wanted. The prospect further dented sentiment across the board.

Several observers pointed to capital rotating toward AI as an additional headwind. Michael Saylor pushed back on suggestions that Strategy's recent Bitcoin sales were to blame — Jim Cramer, for one, declared that "Saylor murdered Bitcoin" — and instead attributed the selloff to AI-driven capital flows. Saylor wrote: "Capital markets are funding the AI buildout at historic scale: ~$400B over 6 months. Bitcoin ETFs have seen ~$4B of outflows since May 14, pressuring $BTC. This is a capital rotation, not a Bitcoin impairment. Volatility creates opportunity."

Ripple-backed SBI Holdings Chair Yoshitaka Kitao echoed the rotation thesis, pointing to upcoming IPOs from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI as likely magnets for capital that might otherwise have stayed in crypto.