Bitcoin Sinks to Four-Month Lows as Investors Eye Sparkly IPOs

Bitcoin may be having a worse week than Euphoria fans who wanted a Season 4 with more glitter makeup. The cryptocurrency plunged to its lowest level since February, briefly bottoming out below $62,000 Thursday. 

The weak week kicked off Monday when Michael Saylor, a bitcoin maximalist known for saying he’d never sell, sold a small part of his massive stockpile for the first time since 2022. Saylor’s bitcoin-holding company, Strategy, parted with 32 bitcoin for about $2.5 million, a few grains of sand off its mountain of more than 800,000 bitcoin worth tens of billions of dollars.

But that little bit of sand seemed to get in investors’ eyes.

Tech Stocks Break Up with Bitcoin

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both notched records this week, challenging the narrative that tech stocks and crypto are tightly tied. The reason could be simple: When it comes to speculative trading, crypto simply has less hype around it right now. Investors may be liquidating some crypto to prepare for a burst of splashy IPOs, with SpaceX going first and AI titans OpenAI and Anthropic likely to follow. Saylor pointed to “capital rotation” toward the AI boom as a key reason that bitcoin is resetting.

Crypto’s biggest upcoming event, meanwhile, is TBD: Investors are growing frustrated waiting for passage of the Clarity Act. Bitcoin’s most prominent corporate maximalist, Strategy, showing even a small stutter in its step could hurt confidence at a sensitive time:

• Public companies have piled into crypto during the industry-friendly Trump era, and together they now hold 1.24 million bitcoin. Companies that copied Strategy’s playbook could be backing out of their positions in Saylor’s wake. 
• Spot bitcoin ETFs, which have helped drive the crypto’s gains in the past, set a record for consecutive outflows this week as investors liquidated $4.4 billion over 13 days. 

Waiting Game: While there are many reasons bitcoin enthusiasm could be waning, bitcoin might also be experiencing normal growing pains that long-term HODLers know all too well. Wolfe Research wrote in a note that bitcoin’s four-year cycle could see the token dip below $40,000 this fall before picking back up.