The price of bitcoin fell below the $60,000 mark on Friday, taking it to a level not seen since October 2024, ahead of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election the following month. Trump has enacted several policies considered beneficial to bitcoin and the broader crypto industry, such as the removal of Gary Gensler as head of the SEC, the establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserveand a Pardon for convicted Silk Road operator Ross Ulbrichtto notable part of his campaign. And for a while, the market loved it.
After the price of bitcoin hit a new all-time high of around $125,000 last October, the cryptocurrency market as a whole has suffered, with privacy-focused altcoin Zcash also seeing a 60% drop in recent days following the critical bug disclosure.
For those who don’t remember, the price of bitcoin rose from around $66,000 to nearly $110,000 in the weeks following Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. However, those earlier gains have now been more than fully recovered. While some say bitcoin’s recent price weakness has to do with Bitcoin treasury company Strategy’s recent sale of a minuscule percentage of its total Bitcoin holdings.Others within the industry say the recent selling pressure has more to do with bitcoin holders wanting to gain greater exposure to the AI industry, whether through the upcoming initial public offerings of OpenAI and Anthropic or the planned $80 billion capital raise by Google parent company Alphabet in order to expand Gemini infrastructure. Of course, then there’s Mark Cuban, who saying sold its bitcoin after it failed to act as “digital gold” during the recent geopolitical turmoil.
“AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, all the liquidity out of the room,” said the founder and CEO of Forest For The Trees. Luke Gromen noted in a recent interview with Coin Stories. “I think that’s happening to bitcoin as well. I think it’s a victim of that as well.”
While the Trump administration has delivered on some promises to the cryptocurrency industry through actions such as the pardon of Ulbricht and the passage of the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act last year, the bill intended to solidify regulatory clarity for the rest of the cryptocurrency industry, known as the Clarity Act, is still being debated in the Senate. As part of those debates, the banking and crypto industries have been fighting over the legality of offering interest and other types of rewards to stablecoin holders, with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon goes so far as to say Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is ‘full of shit’ in a recent interview.
Many Senate Democrats, and even some Republicans, would also like to see ethics-related language added to the bill, as the Estimated earnings of $1.4 billion in 2025 associated with several crypto projects that have found their way into the collective pockets of the Trump family are under increasing scrutiny. The multiple allegations of open corruption related to the Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial crypto project such as the circumstances surrounding the pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng ZhaoThey are also a key concern for Democrats. According to a recent survey62% of the American public does not trust Trump to fairly regulate the crypto industry.
While the price of bitcoin has struggled in recent months, Zcash is going through even worse problems. Zcash price fell more than 60% in a couple of days amid the disclosure of a bug that could have allowed an attacker to create artificial currency Zcash out of thin air. In particular, the error was found by a researcher. using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model and existed in the wild for approximately four years. Recently, blockchain security pioneer Manuel Aráoz warned that the progress of various AI models has made decentralized finance (DeFi) unsafe for anyone for the time being.
This most recent incident was the second time a bug that could have allowed an attacker to generate fake Zcash was found on the network. Zcash developers are now working on a method to better audit the supply of Zcash, as the inability to do so is a common criticism of this class of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. It is currently unknown if either of these two vulnerabilities were used to create the Zcash coin out of thin air, as it simply cannot be verified.
Zcash had been one of the best-performing crypto assets in recent months before this most recent bug, and despite the recent price drop, it is still up over 500% over the past year. The price has recovered to around $325 after bottoming at around $250 on Friday morning.
