Bitcoin Dives Below $60K Following Strong Jobs Data, Zcash Crash Shaking Crypto Confidence

Bitcoin continued its recent dive on Friday, falling below the $60,000 mark for the first time since 2024.

The leading cryptocurrency by market cap was recently trading at $59,909, down about 6% on the day and 18.5% over the last week. Other top coins have taken similar hits amid a broader market decline, with Ethereum down 23% on the week at a recent price of $1,555 and Solana falling 22% in the last seven days to $63.75.

Bitcoin has now fallen more than 52% from its all-time high mark of $126,080 set last October.

Growing ETF outflows and Strategy's first Bitcoin sale since 2022 had been pegged as key reasons for the earlier-week losses. However, the latest leg down for Bitcoin and other top coins comes as strong U.S. jobs data sinks fuels expectations of an interest rate cut hike, and as confidence in crypto and blockchain security has been rocked by a major vulnerability for Zcash, a privacy-centric coin.

U.S. employers added 172,000 jobs in May, about double what was expected. Traders now expect rate hikes by the end of the year, according to CME's FedWatch tool, which typically doesn't benefit Bitcoin's price.

"Strong jobs data kills the rate cut narrative," said Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at crypto analytics firm Nansen. "Bitcoin, already down 15% and sitting on uncleared leveraged longs, has no macro catalyst to recover into, and Middle East tensions are keeping risk appetite soft across markets."

Zcash developers patched the bug this week, but said on Thursday that they cannot currently be sure whether or not the vulnerability was used to mint potentially unlimited ZEC, due to the network's privacy-focused design. That disclosure has led to the price of ZEC crashing, now down over 40% over the last 24 hours.

As the ecosystem reckons with the fallout of ZEC's collapse and the future of that particular protocol, the idea that increasingly powerful AI models could be used to discover potential exploits in other major assets could be driving fear across the industry.

It's not showing in the price action Friday, but U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs actually broke their 13-day streak of outflows on Thursday, adding over $3 million worth of investments—a small sum, but a reversal of fortunes after billions of dollars left the funds in recent weeks, flipping overall flows negative so far in 2026.

Stocks are also falling Friday, with the Nasdaq showing a 2.5% drop since open, with Nvidia (NVDA) shares down about 4.5%. Top crypto stocks are feeling the pain, with Strategy (MSTR) down nearly 10% on the day and Coinbase (COIN) down 8.4%.