How’s the Market Doing? 📈
Let’s just tell ourselves the truth: last week was crypto’s worst week since October 2024.
Bitcoin broke below $62,000 on Friday, a four-month low, after starting the week above $70,000. Ethereum fell harder, dropping below $1,700 (down more than 10% in a single day at one point). XRP slipped to $1.12 and Solana to around $66.
Across the market, roughly $1.5 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated as the sell-off accelerated. The Fear & Greed Index has plunged back into “Extreme Fear.” and Bitcoin, as of the time this newsletter was written, is at $61,198. The last time it fell beneath the 62 mark was 2024, so what actually happened?
Two things.
- Michael Saylor blinked: Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world, sold Bitcoin for the first time in four years. For half a decade, Saylor’s entire identity was built on one promise: buy Bitcoin, hold Bitcoin, never sell. So when a June 1st filing revealed the company had sold 32 BTC for about $2.5 million, the crypto world did a genuine double-take. Here’s the important context: 32 BTC is too small compared to the 843,706 BTC Strategy holds. The sale was just 0.0038% of their stack. They sold it to fund dividend payments on their preferred stock, not because they lost faith in Bitcoin. It was a treasury management decision, not a vote of no confidence. But symbolism matters in markets, and “Saylor sells Bitcoin” was a headline the market simply could not unsee.
- AI is eating into crypto’s lunch: A massive amount of investor money is rotating out of crypto and into AI stocks. There’s a $400 billion AI infrastructure buildout happening right now, and capital that might have flowed into Bitcoin is chasing AI returns instead. Even Saylor pointed to this as the real reason behind the price decline.
