Bitcoin slides below $60,000 as Strategy flips to seller, ETF outflows persist

Bitcoin fell below $60,000 for the first time since October 2024. The drop comes as the asset's largest single buyer, Strategy, turned seller, ETF investors headed for the exits, and the prospect of rate hikes replaced earlier hopes of cuts. Speculative money has also rotated toward the red-hot AI trade.

What to know:

• Bitcoin fell below $60,000 for the first time since October 2024.
• It's down nearly 20% just this week, following news that the crypto's largest buyer (Strategy) turned seller.
• ETF outflows, the prospect of interest rate hikes, and speculative money focused on the AI trade have added to the pressure on bitcoin.

Bitcoin BTC $ 62,300.09 tumbled below $60,000 on Friday, breaking the lows of the early February crypto crash and reaching its weakest level since October 2024. The largest cryptocurrency is down nearly 20% in just the past week, and has now lost more than 52% since its October peak above $126,000. Nothing in markets goes up forever, and this is the part where charts get quoted in denial.

Several headwinds have converged over bitcoin recently — the most important being its largest single buyer, Michael Saylor's Strategy, having turned seller. Additionally, spot bitcoin ETFs suffered persistent outflows as investors pulled capital from the sector, instead allocating it to the red-hot artificial intelligence trade and related stocks. The rotation is a familiar pattern: the moment a new narrative sparkles, old "digital gold" gets treated like digital lead.

Stubbornly elevated inflation and a hot labor market report Friday also prompted investors to rethink the path of U.S. monetary policy. Markets that earlier this year expected rate cuts have now fully priced in the Federal Reserve's next move as a rate hike. With that, U.S. stocks have lost momentum after a powerful run to record highs, weighing on risk appetite across markets. The Nasdaq is lower by more than 2% Friday, because apparently everything risk-on has decided to risk-off simultaneously.

Crypto investors have also been grappling with renewed concerns about whether artificial intelligence and quantum computing could expose weaknesses in crypto protocols. Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC) plunged more than 40% overnight after a critical vulnerability was discovered with the help of Anthropic's latest Opus 4.8 AI model. An AI helped find a bug, which is either reassuring for protocol security or a sign that the machines are already auditing us between prompts.