Bitcoin continued its decline on Friday, falling below $60,000 intraday, marking its first breach of this level since 2024. Major crypto assets also retreated in tandem, with the market weighed down by stronger-than-expected US jobs data, ETF volatility, and the Zcash security incident.
Major cryptocurrencies generally declined within a week.
As of press time, Bitcoin was trading at $59,909, down about 6% on the day and down 18.5% over the past week. Ethereum was trading at $1,555, down about 23% for the week; Solana was trading at $63.75, down 22% over the past seven days.
Bitcoin is currently down more than 52% from its all-time high of $126,080 reached last October. In the first half of this week, the market attributed the previous decline to continued outflows from ETFs and Strategy's first Bitcoin sale since 2022.
US jobs data dampened expectations of interest rate cuts.
The latest round of declines is largely related to changes in macroeconomic data. The US added 172,000 jobs in May, roughly double market expectations. Following the data release, traders increased their bets on further interest rate hikes this year, which is typically detrimental to risk assets like Bitcoin.
Nansen Research analyst Lai Søndergaard, from N-Token Issuance, stated that strong employment data weakened market expectations for interest rate cuts. He believes that Bitcoin had already clearly retreated, leveraged long positions were not fully liquidated, and in the absence of new macroeconomic catalysts, the potential for price recovery was limited; meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East were also suppressing overall risk appetite.
The disclosure of the Zcash vulnerability has impacted market confidence.
In addition to macroeconomic factors, the Zcash vulnerability further dampened market sentiment. The development team released a patch this week, but stated on Thursday that, due to the network's emphasis on privacy design, it is currently impossible to confirm whether the vulnerability was exploited to issue a potentially unlimited number of ZECs.
This disclosure triggered a sharp drop in ZEC prices, with a decline of over 40% in the past 24 hours. While the market assesses the potential impact of Zcash, some investors are also concerned that increasingly capable AI models could be used to discover potential vulnerabilities in other mainstream crypto assets, thereby amplifying the industry's sensitivity to security issues.
It's worth noting that the US spot Bitcoin ETF ended a 13-day streak of net outflows on Thursday, recording a net inflow of over $3 million. While the amount is small, given the billions of dollars in outflows over the previous weeks, which would have resulted in an overall net outflow for 2026, this change at least indicates a temporary easing of selling pressure.
