Bitcoin Broke $60,000, and an AI Broke Zcash

The week the floor gave way

The damage was broad. Bitcoin started the week near $74,000 and bled down to an intraday low around $61,500 on Thursday before slipping under $60,000 and then clawing back above it as the week wound down — roughly a 16% drop on the week. Ethereum had it worse, off close to 20%. The majors followed: Dogecoin and Shiba Inu fell about 9%, and XRP slid to multi-month lows near $1.10 on a high-volume breakdown.

There was a macro trigger. A US jobs report came in hot, reviving fears the Fed could hike rather than cut, and risk assets sold off across the board. But that was the spark, not the fuel. The more telling story is in what fell hardest.

The rally’s own winners led the drop

Look at the worst performers and a pattern jumps out: they weren’t random names, they were the exact trades that led the rally. Hyperliquid fell around 15%. Near dropped nearly 20%. Venice Token gave back about the same. These were the hot hands of the last run, and they surrendered weeks of gains in a matter of days. Even Arthur Hayes — who had ridden some of them — said he dumped his entire Hyperliquid and Near positions and called a market top.

When the leaders lead the decline, that points to a positioning unwind rather than a fundamentals story. The leverage data backs it up: over four days, more than $4.47 billion in leveraged bets were liquidated, and roughly 93% of them were longs. This was crowded money getting flushed, not a sudden reassessment of what these protocols are worth.

An AI cracked open Zcash

The strangest thread of the week belonged to Zcash. The privacy coin had been one of the cycle’s darlings, riding a months-long run in the privacy sector. Then Shielded Labs disclosed a vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool — a flaw that had been sitting in the code, undetected, for four years. What finally surfaced it was an AI model. Zcash cratered, down as much as 40% at its worst before settling, with Hayes dumping that position too and bearish bets climbing to a record.

The unsettling part isn’t the single coin. Security researchers warned that if an AI can dig out a four-year-old bug in a major privacy chain, comparable flaws may be lurking elsewhere across crypto — and across traditional finance as well. It lands as a strange double role for the technology of the moment: the same AI boom that has been pulling capital out of crypto and into AI equities just doubled as the thing auditing crypto’s own code, and finding it wanting.