Crypto sold off hard this week, with bitcoin breaking below $60,000 even as the technology stocks that had dragged it down came roaring back.
Bitcoin fell to about $59,200 late Wednesday before buyers pulled it back to around $60,700 on Thursday, down 2.9% over 24 hours and 5.4% on the week, per CoinDesk data.
The damage was deeper across majors. Ether dropped 2.8% to $1,616 for a 7.9% weekly loss, XRP fell to $1.07 and is down 9.2% on the week, and solana slid to $68. Dogecoin and Hyperliquid's HYPE were the worst hit over seven days, down 11.9% and 11.7%. Tron was the only major higher on the week, up 1.9%.
The same AI trade whose collapse pulled crypto lower earlier this week rebounded overnight, meanwhile.
Micron, the largest U.S. maker of memory chips, jumped about 15% after its sales forecast crushed Wall Street estimates, reviving confidence in AI spending. Nasdaq 100 futures rose 1.8%, South Korea's Kospi surged as much as 6%, and Brent crude erased its wartime gains to fall below $73 a barrel as oil flowed back through the Strait of Hormuz.
The pressure on crypto has become its own. The break below $60,000 reflects continued outflows from U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs, the Federal Reserve's hawkish turn and a U.S. dollar that climbed to a seven-month high, said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, in an email to CoinDesk.
A stronger dollar makes dollar-priced assets like bitcoin costlier for foreign buyers and tends to pull money out of risk trades.
FxPro also flagged a longer-term warning. Bitcoin is hovering near its 200-week moving average, the average price over the past roughly four years and a closely watched long-term trend line.
The last three times bitcoin sank to that line, the weakness was prolonged rather than brief, lasting around nine months in 2015, six months in 2018 and roughly six quarters after the 2022 collapse. The firm said the pattern points to a crypto winter, an extended stretch of depressed prices, rather than a quick rebound.
For now, Kuptsikevich sees a band around $61,800 to $62,000 as the next test, a cluster of resting orders that could either pull the price up as short sellers are forced to buy back, or cap the bounce as resistance.
If support breaks, he said, $55,000 is a plausible cycle low. He urged traders to treat risk management as the priority rather than chase direction.
The immediate test is U.S. inflation data due later, in the form of the Fed's preferred price gauge.
A hot reading would reinforce the hawkish Fed and the strong dollar now weighing on crypto, while a soft one could ease both. Either way, crypto is no longer trading on the oil and war headlines that drove June. It is falling on the ETF outflows and thin demand that a rebound in stocks did nothing to fix.