Bitcoin cracks $60,000, sinking to lowest level since October 2024

Bitcoin extended its losses on Friday, dropping to October 2024 lows to cap an already bruising week for crypto investors.

The flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 3.4% at $61,514.90. Earlier, it fell to $59,099.25, its lowest level since October 2024. It was off 16% on the week.

The declines began after Strategy, founded by Michael Saylor, sold a small amount of its bitcoin holding. This weighed on sentiment and forced hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidations that accelerated the downside pressure. Losses were exacerbated after a stronger-than-expected May jobs report Friday sent Treasury yields higher and pressured risk assets.

Strategy gave back earlier losses but still ended the day down 6.9% and the week down 24%, making it the stock’s worst week since November 2022.

At the $60,000 level, bitcoin is down by more than half from its all-time high of about $126,000 reached in October 2025.

Charles-Henry Monchau, chief investment officer at Syz Group, said bitcoin’s latest weekly decline has been driven by a combination of Strategy’s selling and a crowding-out effect from hot money chasing other assets.

“Speculators are going all-in on AI stocks and memory chips, especially in Korea, and the market also anticipates that upcoming monster IPOs will divert some retail money into the new stocks,” Monchau told CNBC over email. 

Additionally, bitcoin’s key catalyst for renewed investor interest, the crypto market structure bill known as the Clarity Act, is drifting further out of reach as legislative priorities shift and lawmakers remain divided on key provisions of the bill.

As uncertainty around the Iran war has kept bitcoin under pressure in recent months, the stock market has risen to new records. The divergence has investors questioning both of bitcoin’s dominant narratives: that it is “digital gold” that should benefit from geopolitical uncertainty, and that it trades like a high beta tech stock.

“We saw the 30-day Pearson correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq and S&P 500 reach a near-perfect positive correlation as recently as a month ago, but that has collapsed over the last several weeks,” Rajiv Sawhney, head of international portfolio management at Wave Digital Assets, told CNBC over email.

“So while global equities, particularly tech stocks, continued to reach new all-time highs, bitcoin has failed to track the same upward price trend.”

Bitcoin ETFs, a big driver of price appreciation, collectively eked out a net inflow of $3 million on Thursday, snapping a 13-day streak — and their longest streak ever — of outflows. Net assets across bitcoin ETFs fell to $80.4 billion from $107.8 billion on May 14.

Others see the most recent moves as an opportunity to buy the dip. Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe on Friday, Strive chief executive Matt Cole said that bitcoin’s fundamentals have “never been better.”

“This is the fifth time that bitcoin has been at its 200-week moving average — the previous four have all been the perfect time to buy the dip, and I think this time will age in the same manner,” he added. 

Elsewhere, privacy coin Zcash tumbled after an AI-assisted security review exposed a long-standing vulnerability that could have allowed the creation of counterfeit ZEC.

—CNBC’s Chris Hayes contributed reporting.