Bitcoin Near $66K as SpaceX Tops $2 Trillion, ARK Buys $444M, Zhipu Surges 33%

Crypto News

Ark Invest, the asset manager run by Cathie Wood, deployed roughly $444.3 million to scoop up nearly 3.3 million shares of SpaceX as the rocket maker began trading on Friday, marking the largest IPO in market history. Priced at $135, the stock closed its first session at $160.95, a 19.2% gain that lifted Ark's stake past $500 million. To fund the purchase, the firm had offloaded about $280 million in holdings the prior week and sold positions in 13 companies — including AMD, Roku and Baidu — for at least $48 million more. With Wood favoring space over digital assets, traders flagged the risk of capital draining from a fragile crypto bear market.

The rally extended into Monday, with SpaceX climbing about 6% in pre-market trade to near $170 and pushing its valuation above $2 trillion, briefly ranking it among the five most valuable listed US firms. Yet Wall Street's first coverage exposed a deep split: CFRA Research launched at Sell with a $115 target, Morningstar called the stock severely overvalued at $63, and New Street Research stayed neutral at $165 — a spread of more than 1.6 times. The bearish case rests on a $5 billion 2025 loss and first-quarter capital spending of $10.1 billion, up from $4.1 billion a year earlier, as risk appetite drifts far from Bitcoin's prior all-time high.

The week's other shock came from artificial intelligence. The US Commerce Department imposed export controls on Anthropic's flagship Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, barring foreign nationals and effectively cutting off every customer's access to the two systems. Officials say the move was set off by a phone call from Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, who flagged that the models' safety guardrails could be bypassed just days after Fable 5's public release. Anthropic refused a takedown request and publicly branded the controls disproportionate, questioning the transparency of the decision and pushing its already strained relationship with the Trump administration to a new low.

On the same day, Anthropic told Claude users that identity verification will become mandatory from July 8 across its free, Pro and Max tiers. The process requires uploading a government-issued photo ID — a passport or national identity card — followed by a live selfie matched through third-party provider Persona. The company framed the change as a privacy-policy update and said the collected data will not feed model training. Still, the shift ends anonymous access to one of the most widely used AI assistants, extending the industry's guardrails from the model layer to the user, much as identity checks reshaped early AI crypto wallet onboarding.

China's AI sector read the clampdown as a gift. Shares of Beijing-based Zhipu surged 33% on Monday — its sharpest single-day jump this year — as investors bet the export curbs would funnel demand toward unrestricted domestic alternatives. Zhipu sealed the timing by announcing that its GLM-5.2 flagship will ship this week as open source with no usage limits, a direct contrast to the API-bound models just blocked. Bank of America initiated coverage of Zhipu at Buy with a HK$1,250 target and MiniMax at Buy with HK$500, framing a two-speed AI market that benefits everything from enterprise software to AI trading bot development beyond US policy reach.

Regulatory caution also surfaced in Japan, where Bitbank, one of the country's three largest exchanges, warned that accounts tied to prediction-market activity could be frozen. The exchange said deposits or withdrawals linked to platforms such as Polymarket may breach Japanese gambling law if used to chase profit, and suspended accounts would lose login, funding, withdrawal and trading access. Bitbank cited no specific regulatory order, signaling a pre-emptive compliance posture as it integrates into SBI Group following its acquisition. Polymarket currently lists Japan among 35 restricted regions but flagged in May that it is weighing entry into the market.

Taken together, the week sketches a single arc: risk capital is rotating out of crypto and into the AI and space narratives now dominating equity desks, while regulation tightens around the sector's edges. COINOTAG's aggregate market data underscores the strain — our Fear & Greed Index sits at 20, deep in Extreme Fear, Bitcoin dominance has climbed to 70%, and total crypto market capitalization has slipped to roughly $1.90 trillion as Bitcoin trades near $66,234. With dominance that high, altcoins are absorbing the heaviest pressure, and on-chain flows confirm liquidity is consolidating into Bitcoin rather than expanding across risk assets. Until risk appetite returns, crypto looks set to compete with quadrillion-dollar ambitions for a finite pool of capital.