bitcoin recovered the $91,000 level by early US afternoon on Friday, continuing the volatile action and threatening to sustainably break out of its narrow one-week range of around $88,000-90,000.
Possibly behind the rapid 2% move from the morning lows was suspected currency market intervention by the Japanese authorities. The Bank of Japan overnight left its monetary policy unchanged, but was somewhat aggressive in its policy statement. This caused the yen to strengthen modestly against the US dollar, a move that quickly worsened shortly after midday on the US East Coast, with some traders saying the action had the makings of a currency intervention.
Despite all the talk about President Trump, Greenland, tariffs, precious metals, artificial intelligence, and many other headline-grabbing topics, there is a sizable group of traders who believe that the weakening of the yen exchange rate in recent months (and the implications for leveraged carry trades) is behind the struggles of bitcoin and the crypto market in general.
To the extent that weakness reverses, those same traders believe risk assets like cryptocurrencies could benefit.
Cryptocurrency-related stocks rise
Bitcoin miners, including those with increasing exposure to AI infrastructure, reversed all of their initial declines in a strong rally. Iren (IREN), Hut 8 (HUT), TeraWulf (WULF), and CleanSpark (CLSK) are all up 5% to 10% despite starting the session in the red. Strategy (MSTR), the largest corporate bitcoin holder, rebounded 5% from Friday’s low. With a sharp drop early on Friday, Coinbase (COIN) narrowed its loss to just 1%.
US stocks have also reversed an initial decline, with the Nasdaq now up 0.6%.
Precious metals continue to soar, with silver up more than 5% to $101.44 an ounce and gold up 1.5% to just under $5,000. Platinum and palladium rose more than 6% each.
