The Bitcoin price crash has reached a painful milestone: the world’s largest cryptocurrency briefly slipped below $60,000 on Friday, erasing the remarkable rally that took hold after Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign lit a fire under the entire market. For investors who rode the boom, it’s a sobering reversal.

A Brutal Friday

Bitcoin sank to a low of $59,840 just after noon Friday before clawing back some ground, climbing back above $61,000 by shortly after 1:15 p.m. EST. Even with that partial recovery, the damage over the past week has been severe.

The pain hasn’t been limited to bitcoin. Across the board, major tokens have tumbled:

• Bitcoin: down 18% over the past week
• Ethereum: down 21%
• Solana: down 21.5%
• XRP: down 16.8%
• Dogecoin: down 17.9%
• BNB: down 10.5%
• Tron: down 6.5%

Friday’s low marked bitcoin’s weakest level since October 10, 2024 — the very moment that preceded the Trump-fueled surge, which eventually pushed the coin past $100,000 for the first time by early December of that year.

What Triggered the Slide

The latest leg down followed an announcement from Strategy, the firm led by Michael Saylor and the largest institutional holder of bitcoin in the world. The company said it would sell 32 bitcoins to raise roughly $2.5 million — only its second such sale ever, and its first since December 2022.

For a company long synonymous with relentless accumulation, the move sent an unsettling signal. When even the most committed institutional buyer starts trimming, it tends to rattle the broader market.

Half of the Peak, Gone

Step back, and the scale of the decline is striking. Bitcoin now sits more than 50% below its all-time high of $126,186, reached back in October 2025. In other words, the most valuable cryptocurrency on the planet has shed more than half its value in roughly eight months.

The carnage extends across the entire sector. Since May 10, the global crypto market has lost around $600 billion in aggregate value, falling from a peak of $2.7 trillion to about $2.1 trillion as of Friday, according to CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin alone accounts for roughly 58% of that total, so its swings tend to drag everything else along with it.

A Cautionary Tale: Cardano

The wreckage isn’t confined to the biggest names. Cardano’s ADA token — once the third-largest cryptocurrency behind bitcoin and ethereum — slumped to a six-year low on Wednesday.

That selloff had its own trigger. The Cardano Foundation, the Swiss nonprofit that promotes and oversees development of the Cardano blockchain, announced it would cancel its flagship summit after a community vote failed. The episode underscored how quickly sentiment can sour when confidence and momentum evaporate together.

How We Got Here

To understand the crash, it helps to remember just how far bitcoin climbed. The record-setting run of the past year was powered by Trump’s pro-crypto stance, including his stated ambition to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.”

The ride was anything but smooth. After his inauguration, bitcoin slid to a low just above $75,000 by April 2025. But promises of crypto-friendly legislation reignited the rally, lifting the coin above $120,000 by July and past $122,000 days later. Adding fuel, several firms made major crypto bets — among them Trump Media and Technology Group, which announced plans to raise some $2.5 billion to build a corporate bitcoin reserve.

Then the momentum faded. Since peaking in October 2025, bitcoin has steadily deteriorated, weighed down by two main forces:

• Waning demand for spot bitcoin ETFs, which had been a key channel for new money entering the market.
• Diminishing odds of future interest rate cuts, which makes riskier assets like crypto less attractive.

The Bigger Picture

Friday’s drop below $60,000 is more than a round-number scare — it represents the complete unwinding of the gains that defined bitcoin’s most euphoric stretch. The political tailwinds that once seemed unstoppable have given way to harder realities: tightening monetary expectations, cooling institutional appetite, and a market suddenly questioning whether the run-up was ever sustainable.

Crypto has weathered crashes before and rebounded in dramatic fashion, so writing off the asset would be premature. But the speed and breadth of this decline are a stark reminder of how fragile sentiment-driven rallies can be. When the narrative shifts — whether through a single institutional sale or a broader change in the economic backdrop — prices can fall just as fast as they climbed.

For now, the Bitcoin price crash has reset the board, and the market is left waiting to see whether this is a pause, a deeper correction, or the start of a longer winter.