Bitcoin fell to $62,715 in Asian time on Friday, down 1.9% on the day and 14.5% on the week, as the AI trading that has boosted global risk assets through 2026 gasped.
Ether fell a further 4.8% to $1,696 and is now down more than 15% for the week, while Solana fell 5.4% to $66.51, taking its seven-day loss to 18.5%.
The sell-off was led from outside cryptocurrencies. Broadcom’s quarterly AI chip outlook fell short of lofty expectations on Wednesday, halting a months-long rally in semiconductor stocks from their war-driven lows.
Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.9% on Friday, extending the index to a third straight day of declines. South Korea’s KOSPI, the best-performing major stock index this year and the cleanest in AI development, fell 4.7%, and chipmaker SK Hynix lost 8%. MSCI’s Asia-Pacific stock gauge fell 1.4%.
Currency markets sent their own signal of tension. The Korean won extended its slide to its lowest level in 2009. The Indonesian rupiah traded near its all-time low against the dollar as foreign investors withdrew billions from local bond markets.
The Indian rupee broke the trend after the Reserve Bank of India announced new measures to attract capital inflows. The picture across Asia is one of a coordinated shift in risk aversion that has been quietly brewing all week.
Crypto was perfectly within that image. Hyperliquid’s HYPE, which had been the only token in the top 10 to remain in the green on a weekly basis, fell 14.8% to $62.14, erasing almost all of its recent outperformance and leaving only a slight 1.5% gain on the week.
The narrative that high cash flow tokens were turning into a supply while the rest of the cryptocurrencies were bleeding lasted less than a single trading session. Zcash, the only other green dot from yesterday’s rankings, has now returned its weekly outperformance and then some.
The structural context has not softened. US spot bitcoin ETFs have recorded 13 consecutive sessions of net outflows totaling about $4.4 billion since mid-May.
Strategy unveiled its first disclosed bitcoin sale since 2022 earlier this week, offloading 32 BTC to fund preferred stock dividend obligations. Combined, those two flows have removed a structural supply that supported Bitcoin for most of the last 18 months.
The next test is Friday’s US nonfarm payrolls report. A soft print would revive expectations of Federal Reserve cuts under newly confirmed Chairman Kevin Warsh, push real yields lower, and likely send AI trading back up, taking cryptocurrencies with it.
A hot print does the opposite. Until the data comes in, the path of least resistance for both stocks and cryptocurrencies is the one they are already following.
