Bitcoin slid to $62,715 in Asian trading on Friday, extending a weekly drop of 14.5% as crypto sold off alongside a broader pullback in risk assets. Ether fell 4.8% to $1,696 and Solana lost 5.4% to $66.51, showing the move was not confined to a single token but hit much of the market at once.
The timing mattered. Friday’s U.S. nonfarm payrolls report was the next major test for markets, and a soft reading could revive expectations for Federal Reserve cuts under newly confirmed chair Kevin Warsh, while a hot print would do the opposite. Traders were already looking for answers after the AI trade that had helped prop up risk assets through 2026 lost momentum, with Nasdaq 100 futures down 0.9% and South Korea’s KOSPI tumbling 4.7% after Broadcom’s quarterly AI-chip outlook missed elevated expectations on Wednesday.
The weakness spread well beyond bitcoin. MSCI’s Asia-Pacific equities gauge fell 1.4%, SK Hynix dropped 8%, the Korean won extended its slide to a 2009 low, and the Indonesian rupiah traded near its record low against the dollar. The Indian rupee bucked the trend after the Reserve Bank of India announced fresh measures to attract capital inflows, but that did little to change the tone around crypto, which is still closely tied to swings in global appetite for growth and leverage.
There were also pressures inside the market. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs logged 13 straight sessions of net outflows totaling roughly $4.4 billion since mid-May, and Strategy filed its first disclosed bitcoin sale since 2022 earlier this week, offloading 32 BTC to help fund preferred stock dividend obligations. Those moves mattered because they chipped away at two supports that had helped sustain bitcoin for most of the past 18 months, even before Friday’s risk-off turn.
HYPE, which had been the only top-10 token still green on a weekly basis, was caught in the same washout. It dropped 14.8% to $62.14 on Friday and was left with only a thin 1.5% gain for the week, nearly wiping out the outperformance that had made it the rare bright spot in a weak market. For now, the path for bitcoin is less about whether one token is oversold and more about whether Friday’s payrolls report cools the AI trade further or gives risk assets a reason to breathe.
