PANews reported on June 7th that, according to CoinDesk, Bitcoin fell 17.3% and Ethereum fell 22% this week, marking potentially the largest weekly declines for both assets since November 2022. Data from TradingView shows that the digital asset market lost approximately $390 billion in market capitalization this week, leaving its total market capitalization hovering above $2 trillion. This is less than half of the peak of nearly $4.2 trillion in October. It wasn't just prices that suffered. According to CoinGlass data, leveraged positions in digital assets were liquidated this week, totaling approximately $7 billion, with the most severe sell-offs occurring on Monday and Friday. Of these, approximately $5.7 billion were long positions.
This decline is the result of a combination of negative factors. Earlier this week, Strategy disclosed that it sold Bitcoin for the first time in nearly four years. The transaction was small, involving only 32 bitcoins, worth approximately $2.5 million. However, this sale unsettled investors, who had consistently viewed Michael Saylor's company as a source of continuous demand. Investors also began to question whether Strategy needed to sell more Bitcoin to repay debt associated with its growing preferred stock. Meanwhile, the asset size of Bitcoin ETFs continued to shrink. Vetle Lunde, head of K33 Research, pointed out earlier this week that some of the outflows reflected a broader trend of capital shifting from cryptocurrencies to AI investments.
Concerns that AI could expose flaws in crypto protocols also exacerbated this pressure. Zcash (ZEC), one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies earlier this year, saw its price plummet by more than 40% after researchers used Anthropic's latest AI model to discover a critical vulnerability in the network's privacy system. The final blow came from Friday's stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs report, forcing investors to rethink the Federal Reserve's next move. Earlier this year, the market had anticipated a rate cut by the central bank, but now it increasingly expects a rate hike if inflation remains high. U.S. Treasury yields surged, and the Nasdaq 100 suffered its worst day since the tariff-triggered sell-off in April 2025, ending a record rally that had been a major source of optimism on Wall Street this year.
