Big Friday Crypto Selloff Pulls Bitcoin Below $70K

Ideas about lower U.S. interest rates were foiled again and a plunge in shares of speculative favorite GameStop soured the mood in crypto.

The U.S. employment report for May came in far stronger than expected on Friday, with 272,000 jobs added, challenging hopes for an imminent interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve.

At press time, bitcoin (BTC) was trading down 2.5% over the past 24 hours at $69,000, while the broader CoinDesk 20 Index was down 5% over the same time frame.

Among CoinDesk 20 constituents, ether (ETH) was off 4%, while XTX and EOS {{EXOS}} each fell 10%. Solana (SOL) was down 7%.

According to data tracked by Coinglass, the selloff led to $450 million in liquidations, the largest amount since a mid-April washout.

Bitcoin's price began heading lower in the U.S. morning after the government's employment report for May showed that 272,000 jobs were added, far more than the 190,000 economists were expecting on average.

The strong jobs numbers pushed interest rates and the dollar sharply higher, presenting a setback to hopes that the Fed will begin cutting interest rates in the near future. Higher interest rates make non-yielding assets like crypto less attractive to some investors.

The selloff in bitcoin and crypto really picked up steam several hours later as Roaring Kitty, the trading legend whose posts helped fuel the meme stock mania of 2021, held a hotly anticipated YouTube livestream for the first time in several years.

Many viewers were expecting Kitty, whose real name is Keith Gill, to use the livestream to announce some sort of big trade or investment, but he instead said little of interest on that front. He did, however, express his hope that GameStop (GME) management will be able to transform the company into something of great value in coming years.

Already lower on the day, GME shares fell further during the broadcast, ultimately closing down 40% for the session. The price of the GME meme coin fell by 50% from highs reached earlier Friday.

Other meme coins were also lower on the day, with dogecoin (DOGE) down 8% over the past 24 hours, shiba inu (SHIB) down 10% and pepecoin (PEPE) down 15%.

On Thursday, the bullishрующие настроения for bitcoin were highlighted by another day of massive inflows into bitcoin ETFs, with more than 20,000 BTC (around $1.4 billion at current prices) added to the funds on Thursday alone.

The inflows now stand at 56,380 BTC (around $3.9 billion) over 18 consecutive days of inflows, which is nearly 7x the amount of bitcoin that was mined during that period, according to HODL Capital.

The inflows, which began on May 18, are now the longest streak on record and easily outpace the 10 days of inflows,彙集了 15,340 BTC (then valued at $700 million), that followed the ETF launches in April.

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