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Volatility is expected in crypto, but these wild swings have not been seen since late 2022, when the FTX empire of notorious crypto conman Sam Bankman-Fried blew up. On Thursday evening, Bitcoin briefly dipped below $60,000, which represented a roughly 52% drop since its all-time high of $126,000 in October. By early afternoon on Friday, though, the original cryptocurrency surged up about 17% to its current price of roughly $70,000, according to Binance.
The 24-hour rollercoaster ride for Bitcoin mirrors the behavior of the broader stock market amid resurfacing fears of an AI bubble. Stocks for major tech companies, especially software-based companies, dipped on Thursday after Anthropic released an AI plugin that could threaten some major firms’ business models.
“[Bitcoin’s dip] did not happen in isolation and came alongside weakness in tech and other assets, pointing to a broader cross-asset deleveraging rather than a single crypto-specific trigger,” said Jasper De Maere, desk strategist at Wintermute.
The skittishness with tech stocks subsided on Friday, with shares of Nvidia and Microsoft going up, as did the price of Bitcoin.
Crypto’s overnight bounceback does not put a dent in the damage done over the past four months. In October, the crypto world was riding the wave of President Donald Trump’s favorable policies toward the sector, and Bitcoin’s price reached an all-time high of $126,000. Those gains have been erased and then some as investors are no longer viewing crypto as a safe haven asset.
If there was one face representing this decline, it would be that of Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy. His company, often referred to as the first digital asset treasury, exists in order to buy and hoard Bitcoin. On Thursday, Strategy announced a $12.4 billion net loss in the most recent quarter. Saylor, a longtime Bitcoin believer, said that he was confident in a rebound thanks to Trump, who he called the ‘Bitcoin president.’
Bitcoin could be floating at its current price for a while, according to one analyst. “We’ve seen prices bouncing back to [around $70k] as there seems to be some appetite to step in at these levels,” De Maere said.