Bitcoin, Ether Post Steepest Weekly Drop Since FTX Fallout as Crypto Market Sheds $390 Billion
Crypto markets suffered one of their harshest weeks in years, with heavy selling erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Bitcoin (BTC) slid 17.3% for the week to around $61,267.78, while ether (ETH) sank 22%, leaving both set for their biggest weekly declines since November 2022, when Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX collapse sparked a broad panic.
Prices steadied modestly on Saturday but stayed near the lows, with BTC hovering just above $60,000 and ETH trading around $1,550.
The downturn spread well beyond the two largest tokens. Total crypto market value fell by roughly $390 billion over the week, leaving overall capitalization just above $2 trillion, according to TradingView. That's less than half of the nearly $4.2 trillion peak reached in October.
Derivatives markets also took a hit. CoinGlass data show about $7 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated across digital assets during the week, with the sharpest flushes occurring Monday and Friday. Roughly $5.7 billion of the liquidations were long positions.
Several bearish catalysts landed at once. Early in the week, Strategy (MSTR) — the largest corporate holder of bitcoin — disclosed its first BTC sale in nearly four years. The amount was small, just 32 BTC worth about $2.5 million, but it unsettled investors who had viewed Michael Saylor's firm as a persistent source of demand. Some also began to question whether Strategy could ultimately need to sell additional bitcoin to meet obligations tied to its expanding preferred equity stack.
Bitcoin ETFs continued to see outflows. K33 Research head Vetle Lunde said part of the move may reflect a broader rotation away from crypto and toward artificial intelligence (AI) investments. With AI-linked stocks at record highs and investors looking ahead to possible IPOs from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, Lunde said the "opportunity cost of holding BTC" is becoming harder for some portfolios to justify.
AI-driven scrutiny of crypto protocols added to the pressure. Zcash (ZEC), one of the year's early outperformers, dropped more than 40% after researchers used Anthropic's latest AI model to identify a critical weakness in the network's privacy system.
A stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs report on Friday delivered another jolt, prompting investors to reassess the Federal Reserve's next steps. Markets that started the year pricing in rate cuts are increasingly considering the possibility of hikes if inflation stays elevated. Treasury yields jumped, and the Nasdaq 100 logged its worst session since the tariff-driven selloff in April 2025, ending a record run that had powered much of Wall Street's optimism.
With traditional markets closed for the weekend, selling pressure appeared to ease and crypto prices stabilized on Saturday. Whether the week's collapse represents the kind of capitulation often seen near market bottoms or simply another leg lower may hinge on the broader macro backdrop. Rising yields, renewed rate-hike concerns, and sustained competition for capital from AI investments and potential IPOs remain key obstacles to a recovery.
