Bitcoin Stalls Near $65K as Equities Slip and Gold Finds Bid

Bitcoin’s midweek pop above $69,000 didn’t stick. By Friday afternoon, price slid a little over 3% to $65,222—hovering around half of its $126,080 all-time high—while risk assets broadly softened and gold attracted fresh demand.

The cross-asset tell matters here. The S&P 500 fell 0.7% and the Nasdaq dropped 1.15% from the open, yet gold climbed 1.4% to $5,268. In that setup, Bitcoin is trading more like high-beta tech than “digital gold,” at least for now. The 10% global tariff rolled out by President Donald Trump added macro friction earlier in the week, and Nvidia’s earnings briefly steadied the tape, but the follow-through in crypto faded once the headline rush cleared.

Technically and behaviorally, the $70,000 round number acted like a ceiling. Tokyo-based exchange Bitbank noted momentum cooled after that psychological marker and, lacking fresh catalysts, BTC has chopped in a tight mid-to-high $60K range since Thursday. With weekly performance down 3.5% per CoinGecko, positioning looks tentative into the weekend.

Crypto majors tracked the weakness: - Ethereum fell more than 5% to $1,918. - XRP slipped about 4% to $1.35. - Solana declined over 5% to $81.50.

The equity tape sharpened the message. CoreWeave (CRWV)—which has evolved from Bitcoin mining into AI-first cloud compute—tumbled 21% to $76.92 after Macquarie cut its price target to $90 from $115. The bank flagged an earnings miss and significant capital needs before new capacity comes online, cautioning that delivery at this scale may be uneven. Markets are reminding capital-intensive infrastructure names that timing, financing costs, and execution risk are just as important as total addressable demand.

Treasury-heavy crypto plays also sold off. BitMine Immersion Technologies dropped 7.3% to $18.95; it holds 4.42 million ETH valued around $8.2 billion at current prices. Sharplink (SBET) fell 6.7% to $6.73 and holds over 863,000 ETH—about $1.6 billion. These vehicles often trade like leveraged proxies on their underlying treasuries: when ETH declines, the embedded NAV pull plus operational overhang can amplify drawdowns.

One exception: Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc. jumped nearly 15% intraday (after an earlier 14% surge) under ticker XYZ, following a plan to cut 40% of staff and lean harder into AI. Investors usually reward rapid cost discipline during risk-off stretches, even if the long-run product and culture impacts take time to surface. In contrast with compute buildouts that demand heavy upfront spend, that kind of immediate cash flow protection screens well when volatility rises.

What ties these moves together is the market’s current preference map. In the face of new trade frictions and earnings crosscurrents, investors are paying up for certainty—gold, cash flow, and near-term delivery—while discounting promises that require large, staggered capex or new narratives to reignite. Bitcoin sits in the middle of that tug-of-war: its “store-of-value” claim should benefit from policy uncertainty, but its realized trading behavior still leans risk-on when equities wobble and liquidity tightens.

Into next week, watch for signs that could reassert BTC’s defensive pitch: improved spot demand, cleaner funding, and a broader base of buyers beyond momentum chasers around $70K. Absent that, the $65K–$69K band may continue to compress until a macro shock or a crypto-native catalyst forces repricing.