Live updates: Bitcoin falls to $63,500; Anthropic to watermark Claude's AI content after EU regulations
The companies that made crypto respectable are leaving for AI, and that's pressuring bitcoin
Bitcoin slipped 2% to about $64,200 on Monday, dragged down less by any single catalyst than by the corporations that once championed it turning their attention to AI, says Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro.
The wider market fell 2% to $2.18 trillion, with roughly ten coins falling for every one that rose.
The names doing the pivoting are the ones that gave crypto institutional cover, holders led by Strategy and miners like MARA, which spent the past two years rebranding themselves around AI data centers.
Institutional money is now selling bitcoin to build liquidity or rotate into that trade, Kuptsikevich said, and with corporate enthusiasm draining, the risk is that BTC position liquidation accelerates over the coming weeks.
Corporations joined crypto when it flattered their image, the reverse of the stock market, where retail usually arrives last and takes the losses. As those companies leave, Kuptsikevich argues, they hand crypto back to the retail base that built it, returning bitcoin to its ideological roots even if the exit stings on the way out.
Bitcoin is sitting just above its 50-day moving average, which has traded nearly flat for three weeks, a standoff between sellers distributing and buyers absorbing. Watch whether that line holds.