Crypto's Worst Week Since 2024: The Buyers Blinked

The week Bitcoin gave back $14,000

Bitcoin opened the week trading near $74,000 and spent the next five sessions losing ground in a straight line. By Tuesday it was under $70,000. By Wednesday, under $67,000. By Friday it touched roughly $60,000 — its weakest level since October 2024 — before clawing back toward $63,000 into the weekend. Top to bottom, that’s about a 15% drawdown in a single week.

The damage underneath the price was worse than the price itself. Across the slide, total liquidations ran to roughly $4.47 billion, and about 93% of that was long positions getting wiped out. This was a market leaning hard on “up” that got met with “down” — the kind of one-sided positioning that turns an orderly pullback into a cascade.

Why the bid disappeared

The selling pressure didn’t come from one source. It came from four at once, which is exactly why the week felt relentless rather than like a single shock.

The first and most psychologically important: the largest corporate holder turned seller. Strategy — Michael Saylor’s company, the single biggest corporate Bitcoin buyer of the last several years — booked its first Bitcoin sale in four years. The specific dollar amount matters less than the signal. For most of this cycle, Strategy was the buyer the market assumed would always be there to absorb weakness. When that buyer becomes a seller, the perceived floor moves a long way down.

The second: the spot Bitcoin ETFs went into sustained outflow, with redemptions mounting through the week. This is the part the financial press routinely gets wrong, so it’s worth being precise. ETF outflows do not mean BlackRock or any other issuer decided Bitcoin was going lower. A spot ETF holds a pool of Bitcoin in custody, and shares are a proportional claim on that pool. When investors redeem, the fund hands back the corresponding Bitcoin to meet the outflow — it’s a shareholder-driven mechanism, not a directional call by the issuer. But the effect on the tape is identical either way: a steady stream of supply hitting a market with thinner demand to catch it.

The third is a thread we’ve been pulling on for weeks: the AI trade. Saylor, Mati Greenspan, and Jameson Lopp all pointed at the same culprit — capital rotating out of crypto and into the AI boom. The framing we’ve used before held up again this week. Bitcoin isn’t so much crashing as it’s being outbid for the same pool of risk dollars, and right now those dollars have somewhere louder to go.

The fourth was the spark. A blowout U.S. jobs report flipped the rate conversation from “cuts are coming” to “hikes might be back on the table.” That’s a macro story that properly belongs to the equity and rates desks — but crypto is the highest-octane risk asset on the board, so it tends to feel a change in the rate outlook first and hardest. One sentence of macro, one immediate consequence for crypto, and back to the part that’s actually on-chain.

Zcash and the privacy unwind

Underneath Bitcoin, the real carnage was concentrated in one corner: privacy coins. Zcash detonated. An AI model surfaced a critical flaw in Zcash’s Orchard pool — a forgery vulnerability that had gone undetected for roughly four years — forcing an emergency hard fork. ZEC collapsed more than 30%, bearish bets hit a record, and Arthur Hayes publicly dumped his position. The damage rippled straight through the rest of the privacy trade, with Monero, Dash, and Decred all bleeding alongside it.

The timing is what made it sting. Privacy had been one of the hottest run-up narratives heading into the week — the sector capital had been rotating into. By the end of it, that narrative had a four-year-old bug attached to its flagship name, and the trade unwound about as fast as it had been built.