Bitcoin briefly fell below $62,000 in Asia trading Thursday — its lowest level since early 2025 — triggering more than $1.5 billion in leveraged liquidations over 24 hours, including $800 million in bitcoin longs and $386 million in ether. The proximate cause: Strategy's June 1 disclosure that it sold 32 BTC last week, its first sale since 2022, which markets read as a potential signal that Saylor might need to sell far more to fund preferred stock dividends. Saylor pushed back on X: "Capital markets are funding the AI buildout at historic scale: ~$400B over 6 months. Bitcoin ETFs have seen ~$4B of outflows since May 14, pressuring BTC. This is a capital rotation, not a Bitcoin impairment. Volatility creates opportunity." Charles Schwab's Jim Ferraioli agrees the Saylor sale is a scapegoat: bitcoin is losing the dominant momentum trade to gold, AI stocks, and a record IPO wave — $4B in ETF outflows since May 14, spot volumes at a 2.5-year low, and Broadcom earnings missing AI expectations have now spilled over into a broad semiconductor selloff that's dragging everything risk-on lower with it.
ADA fell below $0.20 for the first time in more than five years Thursday — down nearly 70% over the past year and over 93% from its 2021 all-time high — after Charles Hoskinson posted "I'm taking a break. TTYL" on X following a video warning of a coming "wave of failures" in the Cardano ecosystem. The collapse of TapTools, Cardano's largest analytics platform serving over a million users, triggered the remarks after it announced a wind-down following the departure of its CTO, COO, and two co-founders. The community compounded the damage by voting against treasury funding for Cardano's flagship 2026 Summit in Singapore, forcing its cancellation. TVL has fallen 36% in a month to roughly $186 million, down from over $700 million in late 2024. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of community desire to spend the treasury to take these ventures to the next level," Hoskinson said. The broader market selloff explains some of ADA's decline — but the governance failures, founder frustration, and project closures are Cardano-specific problems that the market is now pricing in hard.
As client interest in crypto exposure has accelerated through 2026, the due diligence frameworks financial advisors apply to traditional assets — custody risk, counterparty exposure, liquidity depth, fee drag — are now being applied to digital assets for the first time by many practitioners. This week's Crypto for Advisors walks through the questions that get skipped in the enthusiasm of a bull market and are now coming due: Who actually holds the keys? What happens in a custodian insolvency? How is the on-chain yield generated, and what are the smart contract risks? What is the actual tax treatment of staking rewards vs. trading gains? And how do you explain to a client why their "bitcoin ETF" dropped 14% in a week when bitcoin itself is supposedly a long-term store of value?
