Bitcoin’s Slide Toward $60,000 and the Supports That Broke

Bitcoin dropped to $60,463 on June 5, its lowest since February 6, as four structural supports that held the coin through 2024 and 2025 gave way simultaneously: record ETF outflows, Strategy’s first net bitcoin sale since 2022, an AI trade breakdown, and Zcash’s privacy narrative collapsing under a cryptographic flaw that cannot be proven unexploited. The coin is down close to 16% from last week’s $74,000-plus high.

The $60,000 Floor

At roughly $62,000 late Thursday, bitcoin sits about $2,700 above the round number that analysts and traders have identified as the next test. A confirmed close below $60,000 would return the coin to levels it last held during the February drawdown, when it briefly touched that floor before recovering over several sessions. Below that, the next meaningful technical cluster sits near $55,000.

Just beneath the current price, the 200-week moving average has historically acted as a long-term floor and hasn’t been breached on a sustained basis since the 2022 bear market. Miners are already under pressure: Antpool data shows daily net profits for Antminer, Whatsminer and Avalon rigs have turned negative and are approaching shutdown prices, suggesting the coin is trading near its production cost. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index, compiled by Alternative.me, printed 11 on June 3, the lowest reading of 2026 and firmly in extreme fear territory.

The bulk of the current slide came in three sessions. Broadcom’s earnings miss on Thursday broke the AI trade’s momentum and accelerated selling across risk assets broadly. Bitcoin fell through $65,000, then $63,000, then below $62,000 by Friday. By that point four separate events had compounded within one week, and the question had shifted from when the coin would recover to whether $60,000 would hold at all.

Strategy’s First Net Sale Since 2022

For nearly six years, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) had accumulated bitcoin without a confirmed net disposal. More than 110 disclosed purchases, funded through convertible debt, equity offerings and preferred shares, had built a treasury of 843,706 BTC at an average cost of $75,699 per coin. The company disclosed the sale in Strategy’s June 1 Form 8-K filed with the SEC.

The filing disclosed that the company sold 32 BTC between May 26 and May 31 at an average net price of $77,135, raising $2.5 million in proceeds. The stated purpose: to fund distributions on STRC, Strategy’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, which carries an 11.5% annualized dividend rate and monthly obligations running to roughly $100 million. Against an 843,706-coin treasury, the sale is less than 0.004% of holdings. But it was the company’s first confirmed net disposal, distinct from the December 2022 tax-loss harvest that was accompanied by a larger simultaneous purchase.

MSTR shares dropped about 6% after the filing. Executive chairman Michael Saylor’s public response on X focused on the preferred product, posting that his goal was to make STRC “the best credit instrument in the world.” Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer said he doesn’t expect bitcoin sales to become the primary source of dividend funding. TD Cowen’s Lance Vitanza kept a $400 MSTR price target, calling the sale economically immaterial.

The harder number is in the background. Bitcoin now trades around $62,000, below Strategy’s average purchase price of $75,699 per coin. The $900 million USD reserve set aside in December 2025 to cover preferred dividends and debt interest was intact as of May 31, per the 8-K, but preferred-stock obligations are a real and recurring cost the company has now confirmed it will cover with its treasury when other funding channels narrow.

Fifteen Sessions of Outflows

U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs, products launched in January 2024 that allow investors to hold BTC through brokerage accounts without direct custody) recorded more than $4.7 billion in net withdrawals across 15 consecutive sessions, the longest outflow run in the category’s history. The prior record was 8 straight outflow days, set in early 2025.

Total bitcoin ETF assets fell from $104.29 billion at the start of the streak to $80.40 billion by June 3, a $23.89 billion combined decline from redemptions and falling bitcoin prices, per CoinDesk data. Galaxy Research, the digital asset investment firm, found the 20-day trailing outflow window reached 73,080 BTC, the heaviest reading ever in bitcoin terms. A brief $3.05 million net inflow on June 4 technically interrupted the streak, though total assets remained near $80 billion and the structural pressure showed no reversal. Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted that cumulative 2026 ETF flows had turned net negative for the first time since launch. Spot Hyperliquid ETFs (HYPE) were the one exception, logging inflows every session since their May 12 debut.

Broadcom’s Guidance Miss Widened the Damage

Bitcoin’s problems worsened on June 4, when Broadcom (Nasdaq: AVGO) disclosed second-quarter results showing AI revenue more than doubled year-over-year to $10.8 billion. CEO Hock Tan projected Q3 AI semiconductor revenue would grow more than 200% year-over-year, yet declined to raise Broadcom’s full-year AI chip guidance. Q3 guidance of $16 billion landed below the street consensus of $17.2 billion. The shares fell 13% Thursday and another 7.9% Friday.

The selloff spread fast. The SOXX semiconductor ETF (an index of chip stocks) dropped 10.4% on Friday, its worst single session since early 2025. Arm Holdings fell 12.8%, Intel fell 11.3%, AMD shed 10.9%. The Nasdaq Composite fell 4.18%, its worst session since April 2025, erasing roughly $1 trillion in combined market value from AI-related equities over two sessions. The capital that had been rotating away from bitcoin and into AI chip suppliers since mid-May was now creating losses on both sides of the trade at once.

Michael Saylor had framed the ETF outflows as “capital rotation, not a Bitcoin impairment” just one day earlier, posting on X that roughly $400 billion had flowed into AI infrastructure over six months while bitcoin ETFs saw $4 billion out. Broadcom’s guidance miss complicated that framing. The logic had been that AI capex and bitcoin’s weakness were two separate stories temporarily competing for the same institutional dollar. After June 4, the AI capex story itself was in question.

Zcash and the Orchard Pool

The Bug That AI Found

Zcash’s collapse this week had different origins. On May 29, security researcher Taylor Hornby, working at Shielded Labs (the Zcash network security and development firm), identified a critical flaw in Orchard, the protocol’s newest shielded privacy pool, using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 AI model during a formal audit. The Orchard pool had been live since the NU5 network upgrade in May 2022, nearly four years before the vulnerability was found.

The flaw sat inside the pool’s zero-knowledge proof circuit. Insufficient constraints in elliptic curve multiplication within the halo2 proof system meant a malicious actor could theoretically have crafted inputs to bypass validity checks and mint counterfeit ZEC tokens that would appear legitimate inside the pool. Developers deployed an emergency fix via the NU6.2 hard fork, activating at block 3,364,600 on June 3. The market initially read the five-day patch cycle as encouraging: ZEC ran from $544 on June 2 to $624 on June 4, traders treating a quick fix with no chain split as a sign of protocol maturity.

The problem no patch can solve: those shielded transactions are private by design. There is no cryptographic method to prove the bug was never exploited during the nearly four years it existed undetected, surviving multiple expert audits. No evidence of exploitation has emerged, though ZEC’s supply integrity cannot be cryptographically attested for that period, and that gap is fatal for a coin whose value proposition rests on cryptographic certainty.

The Exit That Followed

Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder who serves as chief investment officer at Maelstrom, had been one of the more visible institutional advocates for ZEC through its 2026 rally, holding it as part of a framework he called the “Holy Trinity” alongside HYPE and NEAR tokens. On June 5, Hayes posted on X that he had sold the entire position.

The Holy Trinity is dead. Sadly due to the Orchard Pool exploit, I had to dump our entire $ZEC bag. While I think it’s extremely unlikely of any minting, it cannot be formally cryptographically proved impossible. The privacy from AI, govt, big tech narrative demands perfection.

Hayes, on X, June 5, 2026.

ZEC dropped from the June 4 peak of $624 to approximately $309 in under 48 hours, close to a 50% decline, with trading volume spiking 68% above the 30-day average per BitMEX Blog data. Approximately $49 million in leveraged positions were liquidated, long positions absorbing the majority of the damage, and daily spot volume hit $1.7 billion. On-chain analytics firm Arkham noted separately that one unnamed large holder lost more than half the value of a $174 million ZEC position over the period.

Shielded Labs has proposed a network upgrade with new accounting measures that would let anyone verify whether ZEC’s supply has been secretly inflated. Hayes said he would reconsider if his concerns proved unfounded, though he noted he would hope to re-enter at lower prices.

Treasury Companies Have Lost $62 Billion

The broader digital asset treasury cohort (DAT companies that built strategies around accumulating BTC or other crypto as core balance-sheet assets through 2024 and 2025) has shed roughly $62 billion in fully diluted market value since early October, per Artemis blockchain data. The group’s combined valuation peaked near $134 billion and now sits at approximately $72 billion, a contraction that has outpaced bitcoin’s own drawdown from its October high.

Three cases from this week show where the pressure is landing:

• Forward Industries, one of the most aggressive Solana-treasury imitators of the Strategy playbook, deposited 455,784 SOL worth roughly $31.87 million to Coinbase Prime on Friday after more than four weeks of wallet dormancy, per on-chain tracker Lookonchain. The company spent roughly $1.59 billion to accumulate 6.83 million SOL at an average cost of $232.08 per token; Solana now trades at $66.51, putting the full position approximately $1.13 billion underwater. A Coinbase Prime deposit ends a month of inactivity and puts the position within reach of a sale.
• Keel Infrastructure, formerly the bitcoin miner Bitfarms and now repositioned as an AI and digital data center developer, priced a $400 million convertible senior note offering at 1.25%, maturing in 2032, with a conversion price of $7.41 per share, a 25% premium to its June 4 close. Shares fell 8% pre-market on dilution and leverage concerns.
• Strategy disclosed its $900 million USD reserve intact as of May 31, but the 32-coin BTC sale confirmed preferred obligations are real and recurring costs the company will cover from its treasury when other funding channels narrow.

Bitcoin printed $60,463 on June 5, its lowest since February 6. The 200-week moving average, at roughly $60,000 to $61,000, held as a floor during the February drawdown; the last sustained close below that line was in the 2022 bear market.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment or financial advice. Cryptocurrency markets carry significant risk, including the potential loss of principal. Readers should consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions. All prices and figures are accurate as of publication on June 6, 2026.