NEW YORK — The number that mattered most to cryptocurrency traders last week was not a price target or an analyst forecast. It was $60,000 — the floor that had held through Bitcoin’s most turbulent stretches of 2026, the level that long-term bulls treated as the outer boundary of any healthy correction. On Friday, it gave way.
Bitcoin slid to an intraday low of $59,110, Bloomberg reported, marking the first confirmed move below $60,000 since October 2024 and completing a reversal that erased the entire post-election rally. From the record high of $122,000 reached in the months after President Donald Trump’s November 2024 victory, Bitcoin has now surrendered more than half its peak value. What began as a sentiment shock in late May has hardened, week by week, into something that looks less like a correction and more like a sustained liquidation of the Trump-era crypto premium.
The weekly loss approaching 18% landed on a market that was already fragile. Bitcoin had slipped below $70,000 five days earlier, with the combination of geopolitical risk from the Iran nuclear standoff and an institutional seller breaking a years-long silence providing the initial pressure. What followed was not a stabilisation. It was acceleration.
The institutional seller in question was Strategy, the corporate Bitcoin treasury once known as MicroStrategy, which disclosed the sale of 32 Bitcoin for approximately $2.5 million. The transaction was financially immaterial — a rounding error against its holdings of more than 500,000 coins. The signal was not. Strategy had built its entire identity around a policy of never selling. Its preferred-share programs, its shareholder communications, its CEO’s public statements had all rested on that premise. The disclosure landed like a gut punch, BeInCrypto reported, and Bitcoin fell below $72,000 within hours of the filing becoming public. By the time it bottomed on Friday, the damage had spread far beyond that single transaction.
The structural force behind the decline was the ETF market. U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded net outflows across twelve consecutive sessions totalling $3.58 billion, according to data compiled by SoSoValue — the largest sustained withdrawal since the products launched in January 2024. On June 1 and June 2 alone, outflows exceeded $1 billion across two sessions. Total assets under management in U.S. Bitcoin ETFs fell from $104 billion to $94 billion in under a fortnight. When ETF redemptions reach that scale, the funds that hold spot Bitcoin must sell on the open market to meet withdrawals, creating a mechanical selling pressure that compounds whatever sentiment has already turned negative.
The result was a liquidation cascade. Earlier in 2026, analysts had pointed to the U.S. debt burden as a long-term tailwind for Bitcoin as a hedge against dollar debasement. That thesis has not been abandoned, but it has been overwhelmed. The break below $73,000 on May 28 triggered roughly $1 billion in leveraged-long liquidations, with Bitcoin accounting for $386 million of the total, CoinDesk reported. As forced selling from those positions compounded with ETF outflows, the Crypto Fear and Greed Index dropped to 12 — deep into extreme-fear territory.
Altcoins absorbed punishment in excess of Bitcoin itself. On a weekly basis, Ethereum fell 21 percent, Solana 21.5 percent, XRP 16.8 percent, BNB 10.5 percent, and Dogecoin 17.9 percent. The breadth of the decline confirmed what the ETF data had already suggested: this was not a Bitcoin-specific event but a broad-based deleveraging of the crypto complex, driven by forces outside it.
Three macro forces are operating simultaneously. U.S. inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s target, reducing the probability of rate cuts that would otherwise support risk assets. The dollar has strengthened, historically an inverse indicator for Bitcoin. And the geopolitical situation in the Middle East — specifically the prospect of a broader conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States — has pushed institutional capital toward conventional safe-haven assets rather than digital ones. Each of these factors would weigh on Bitcoin individually. Together, they have proven decisive.
What Bitcoin did not have this time was the regulatory tailwind that characterised 2024 and early 2025. The Trump administration’s broadly crypto-friendly posture had underpinned confidence in the asset class through the first half of last year. New U.S. regulatory frameworks for the sector are still in preparation, and traders are watching their progress closely. But the anticipation of favourable rules is no longer doing the work it once did. Expectation has already been priced in; only delivery can move the market now, and delivery remains pending.
The $60,000 level has significance that goes beyond the round number. It represents the approximate price at which Bitcoin was trading on the night of Trump’s election victory in November 2024. The entire rally above that level — through $80,000, $100,000, $122,000 — was built on a specific narrative: that a crypto-friendly administration would accelerate institutional adoption, create a strategic reserve, and legitimise Bitcoin as a treasury asset. That narrative is not dead. But the premium attached to it has been erased, and the market is now in the process of establishing what Bitcoin is worth without it.
Analysts who follow market structure note that the $60,000 zone previously served as support in February 2026, when Bitcoin tested it during an earlier correction and recovered. The difference this time is that the breach came on sustained volume following nearly two weeks of uninterrupted institutional outflows rather than a single-session sentiment shock. Whether the level now functions as resistance on any recovery attempt is a question the market has not yet had to answer. It did not hold long enough on Friday for traders to find out.
What is not yet clear is whether the deleveraging is complete. The $3.58 billion in ETF outflows represents a historically large exodus, and large forced-selling events have sometimes marked local bottoms in prior cycles. But the macro headwinds — persistent inflation, dollar strength, geopolitical risk — have not changed. They are not crypto-specific problems, and no development within the cryptocurrency industry can resolve them. That is the part of the picture that long-term bulls do not yet have an answer for.
