Bitcoin collapsed below $60,000 for the first time since October 2024. Is this the first victim of SpaceX's IPO?

The price of bitcoin has collapsed below $60,000 for the first time since October 2024, Bloomberg calculated . Since reaching an all-time high of $126,272 last October, the largest cryptocurrency has lost more than half its value and is now worth less than when Donald Trump was re-elected for a second term. Some analysts have suggested that investors may be getting rid of crypto assets ahead of several major IPOs.

Bitcoin at trading on Friday, June 5, fell in price by 6% and traded at $59,770. Its price fell for the fifth day in a row, which was the longest series of declines since August last year, Bloomberg noted. Then bitcoin fell for six days, but the collapse of the current week was much sharper, the agency points out.

Along with bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies fell sharply in price: Ether was losing up to 12.8%, dropping to its lowest level since April 2025, while XRP, Solana and Dogecoin were down more than 5%.

According to CoinGlass data cited by Bloomberg, nearly $4 billion of bets on cryptocurrency growth have been liquidated since the beginning of the week, with bitcoin positions accounting for the largest losses. In addition, investors have withdrawn nearly $4.4 billion from U.S.-listed bitcoin exchange-traded funds over the past 13 trading sessions, marking a record-long series of outflows, according to statistics compiled by the agency.

Cryptocurrency market-related stocks also sharply reduced in value: Strategy quotes collapsed by 7.9%, Coinbase - by 8.4%.

Investors may be shifting capital from cryptocurrencies into equities ahead of several major IPOs, according to Tahbib Rahman, an analyst at cryptocurrency research firm Block Scholes, his opinion cited by Barron's. Next week should see the long-awaited debut of SpaceX on the stock exchange.

"There is some evidence of possible capital rotation or at least speculative frenzy in the market for perpetual futures linked to real assets, as well as in perpetual contracts for shares of companies due to IPO. At the same time, we are recording a deterioration in market sentiment towards bitcoin and ether," Rahman said.

When asked on social network X whether cryptocurrency investors could be selling bitcoin to buy shares of players in the artificial intelligence, semiconductor and space sectors ahead of SpaceX's initial public offering, Callum Thomas, founder of analyst firm Top Down Charts, said, "It kind of looks that way - the recent surge in space sector stocks (related to the SpaceX IPO) happened just as bitcoin turned down."

Large-scale equity offerings of companies such as Alphabet, SpaceX and OpenAI, totaling about $350 billion, are literally siphoning capital out of liquid risk assets, including bitcoin, according to financial analyst Thierry Borja, quoted by Benzinga. At issue, in particular, is the unprecedented equity capital raise by Google's parent company Alphabet, which it is directing toward expanding its AI infrastructure and computing power. "Selling it [bitcoin] is the fastest way to free up dollars without triggering tax consequences on long-term equity positions," Borja said.

The CEO of bitcoin-focused company SmashFi posted a meme on social network X depicting what he said was investors exiting the cryptocurrency.

"For a very long time, cryptocurrencies were the hot asset that Silicon Valley and institutional investors were obsessed with. But then they were supplanted by AI," Baird strategist Michael Antonelli told Bloomberg. - AI has taken cryptocurrencies' place as the top investment trend."

The week started badly for the market after the largest corporate holder of bitcoin - Strategy - sold part of its cryptocurrency reserves for the first time in four years, recalls Barron's. At the same time, the company's founder Michael Saylor said last year, "If you have to, sell a kidney, but keep the bitcoins."

The volume of the transaction was small - 32 bitcoins worth $2.5 million - compared to its total assets, estimated at more than $52 billion. Nevertheless, the very fact of the sale by MicroStrategy has seriously alarmed and frightened crypto investors, the publication wrote. There are growing concerns about the sustainability of one of the most important sources of demand for cryptocurrency, Bloomberg noted.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor