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

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

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

Bitcoin is now down more than 52% from its all-time high of $126,080 reached last October.

Growing ETF outflows and Strategy’s first Bitcoin sale since 2022 were cited as the main reasons for last week’s losses. However, the latest step forward for Bitcoin and other top coins comes as strong US jobs data fuels expectations of a rate hike, and as confidence in crypto and blockchain security has been shaken by a major vulnerability for Zcash, a privacy-focused 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 CME’s FedWatch toolwhich generally does not benefit the price of Bitcoin.

“Strong employment data destroys the rate cut narrative,” said Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at crypto analytics firm Nansen. “Bitco, which is already down 15% and sits on leveraged, unsettled long positions, has no macro catalyst to bounce back from, and tensions in the Middle East keep risk appetite in markets weak.”

Zcash developers patched the bug this week, but said Thursday that they cannot currently be certain whether or not the vulnerability has been used to create potentially unlimited ZEC, due to the network’s privacy-focused design. This revelation has caused ZEC’s price to crash and is now down over 40% in the last 24 hours.

As the ecosystem considers the fallout from 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 key assets could cause fear across the industry.

It’s not showing up in Friday’s price action, but US spot Bitcoin ETFs broke their 13-day streak of outflows on Thursday, adding for more than 3 million dollars in investments– a small amount, but a turnaround in fortunes after billions of dollars left the funds in recent weeks, pushing total cash flows into negative territory so far in 2026.

Stocks also fell on Friday, with the Nasdaq down 2.5% since the open, while Nvidia (NVDA) shares fell 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%.