The price of bitcoin fell below $60,000 on Friday, dropping it to a level not seen since October 2024, when Donald Trump won the US presidential election next month. Trump has implemented a number of policies that are seen as beneficial to bitcoin and the larger cryptocurrency industry, such as the removal of Gary Gensler as head of the SEC, strategic bitcoin reserveand a pardon for convicted Silk Road operator Ross Ulbrichta is a remarkable part of the campaign. And for a while the market loved it.
After bitcoin hit an all-time high of around $125,000 last October, the cryptocurrency market as a whole has suffered, and privacy-focused altcoin Zcash has also seen a 60% drop in the past few days. disclosure of a critical error.
For those who don’t remember, the price of bitcoin rose from about $66,000 to about $110,000 in the weeks following Trump’s 2024 election victory. However, these earlier gains have now been completely reversed. Although some say that the recent weakness of the bitcoin price has something to do with it bitcoin treasury company Strategy recently sold a small portion of its total bitcoin holdingsothers in the industry say the recent selling pressure has more to do with bitcoin holders seeking greater exposure to the AI industry, whether through the upcoming initial public offerings of OpenAI and Anthropic, or Google parent Alphabet’s planned $80 billion capital increase to expand infrastructure for Gemini. Of course, there’s Mark Cuban he said he sold bitcoin because it failed to act as “digital gold” during the recent geopolitical turmoil.
Founder and CEO of Forest For The Trees: “AI sucks all the oxygen, all the liquidity out of the room” Luke Gromen noted in a recent interview with Coin Stories. “I think that’s happening with bitcoin as well. I think it’s a victim of that as well.”
While the Trump administration has made good on some promises to the crypto industry through actions like pardoning Ulbricht and passing the stablecoin-centric GENIUS Act last year, a bill intended to strengthen regulatory clarity for the rest of the crypto industry, known as the Clarity Act, is still pending in the Senate. As part of this debate, the banking and cryptocurrency industries are fighting over the legality of offering interest and other types of rewards to stablecoin holders. 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 want ethics language added to the bill. In 2025, it is estimated to make a profit of 1.4 billion dollars Those connected to the various crypto projects that have gone into the collective pockets of the Trump family are increasingly being investigated. Multiple allegations of open corruption related to Trump-linked cryptocurrency project World Liberty Financial, such as the circumstances surrounding the pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhaois also a major 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 having even worse problems. The price of Zcash dropped by more than 60% in a few days a bug that could allow an attacker to create artificial Zcash currency out of thin air. Note that the bug was found by a researcher Using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model and existed in the wild for about four years. Recently, blockchain security pioneer Manuel Araoz warned the advancement of various artificial intelligence models has made decentralized finance (DeFi) dangerous for anyone to use at the moment.
This latest incident is the second time a bug has been discovered in the network that could allow an attacker to create fake Zcash. Zcash developers are now working on a way to better verify the supply of Zcash, as the inability to do so is a common criticism of these privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. Whether either of these two loopholes was used to create the Zcash currency out of thin air is currently unknown, as it simply cannot be verified.
Zcash was one of the best performing cryptoassets in recent months prior to this latest error, and despite the recent price crash, it has still gained more than 500% over the past year. After falling to around $250 on Friday morning, the price recovered to around $325.
