Akshita Jhalani
Crypto Analyst
I have covered enough crypto crashes to know that the number that matters is rarely the one everyone is panicking about. On Friday night, that number was $60,000. And for a few hours, it broke.
Bitcoin fell as low as $59,227 overnight before recovering, steadying after Friday's strong jobs report set off a selloff that sank the Nasdaq 100 about 5% and rattled stocks, bonds and crypto together.
By Saturday morning in Asia, buyers had returned. Bitcoin reclaimed the $61,000 level in Asian morning hours Saturday after briefly dipping below $60,000 overnight, with the token recovering more than $1,500 off the low.
The question now is whether that bounce holds, or whether $60,000 gets retested with more force the next time.
The Jobs Report That Broke the Market
This was not a crypto‑specific sell‑off. The trigger came straight from Wall Street, and it was a number that, in any normal year, would have been celebrated.
Friday's nonfarm payrolls report came in solid, and rather than cheering the strength, markets repriced the Federal Reserve outlook hard. Swaps now fully price a rate increase by the end of 2026, a reversal from the cuts expected under newly confirmed chair Kevin Warsh. Two‑year Treasury yields jumped 12 basis points to 4.16%, the dollar rose, and risk assets fell.
A strong jobs number should be good news. In a world where the Fed is already being pushed toward rate hikes, it became the thing that broke the market's back.
The AI Trade Took the Worst of It
What struck me most watching Friday unfold was where the damage concentrated. This was not a broad market correction. It was a targeted hit on the most crowded trade of the past eighteen months.
The damage was worst in the AI trade. The Nasdaq 100 sank about 5%, its steepest drop since April 2025, and a gauge of chipmakers tumbled 10%. The S&P 500 fell 2.6% and failed to complete a tenth straight weekly gain.
When chipmakers fall 10% in a single session, the sentiment damage travels fast and far. Bitcoin, increasingly correlated with technology risk assets, absorbed its share of that wave directly.
$1.6 Billion Wiped Out in 24 Hours
The leverage sitting in crypto markets going into this week was the real accelerant. When price started moving, the liquidation machine kicked in.
Around $1.60 billion in positions were liquidated over 24 hours across roughly 308,000 traders, with longs accounting for $1.21 billion. Bitcoin saw $534 million in liquidations and ether $423 million.
Altcoins Were Decimated on the Week
If Bitcoin's slide was painful, the altcoin picture was far worse. I tracked the weekly losses across major tokens and none of them made comfortable reading.
Ether is down 21.6% over seven days to around $1,575, Solana down 23.7% to $63, and XRP, Dogecoin and BNB all between 13% and 20% lower. Hyperliquid's HYPE, which outperformed through most of the recent bleed, is down 9.9% over the same stretch.
Even HYPE, which had been one of the few genuine bright spots in a months‑long grind lower, finally succumbed to the broader pressure.
Zcash Added Its Own Layer of Pain
The macro story was bad enough on its own. Zcash made it worse.
Zcash, in the middle of its own 44% collapse tied to a disclosed bug in its Orchard privacy pool, logged another $115 million in liquidations.
I covered the Orchard Pool vulnerability story separately, Arthur Hayes sold his entire ZEC position after the disclosure. But seeing $115 million in Zcash liquidations stacked on top of everything else tells you how much levered exposure had built up even in a privacy coin most of the market had largely forgotten about.
The $60,000 Question Nobody Can Answer Yet
Bitcoin had been sliding toward $60,000 all week as a record run of ETF outflows and Strategy's first bitcoin sale since 2022 removed buyers that had supported the price. The break below the round number overnight did not turn into a deeper breakdown, with the token recovering more than $1,500 off the low.
The recovery is real. But so is the uncertainty.
With $60,000 pierced overnight but quickly reclaimed, a clean break below it would put the token back into territory it last traded during the February drawdown.
I have been in this market long enough to know that levels do not protect you, buyers do. Right now, the buyers stepped in at $59,227 and held the line. Whether they show up again at that price if the market retests it is the only question that matters heading into next week.