Bitcoin Breaks Below $68,000 to Test Its 200-Week Average as Anthropic's IPO Pulls Cash From Crypto

Bitcoin broke below $68,000 overnight into Friday and kept sliding into the weekend, dragging the largest cryptocurrency down to its 200-week moving average, a level many traders treat as the line between a long-term bull market and a bear market.

By early Saturday it had dipped under $67,000. Investing.com put bitcoin at $67,034.60 as of 00:54 ET (04:54 GMT), down 1.61% on the day and at its lowest level since August.

CoinDesk said the drop extends a slide of more than 20% since early October. MarketWatch, citing CoinDesk data, said bitcoin was down nearly 10% for the week, on pace for its worst weekly showing since June.

A $1.23 billion wipeout for leveraged traders

The move hit leveraged bulls hard. Traders lost $1.23 billion to forced liquidations over 24 hours, nearly double the previous day's total, according to CoinGlass data cited by BeInCrypto in a report carried by Yahoo Finance.

Long positions, or bets on higher prices, made up $1.02 billion of that, or 82.7%. Total crypto market capitalization fell 5.75% to $2.33 trillion over the same window.

Bitcoin positions accounted for $637.24 million of the liquidations, with longs making up 90.8%. Ether followed with $256.52 million. In total, 163,631 traders were liquidated, and the largest single order was a $17.81 million ether short on Binance.

Ether has fared even worse than bitcoin this week. MarketWatch said it was down nearly 15% and hit a three-month low of $1,926.47 on Friday. Investing.com had it at $1,904.97 early Saturday, with XRP at $0.9964, Solana at $75.96 and BNB at $621.31.

Is the Anthropic IPO draining crypto?

The theory getting the most attention is that money is leaving bitcoin to chase what could be the largest stock listing in history. Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $64.4 billion, CoinDesk reported, and MarketWatch said the IPO could come as soon as next Thursday.

Investor demand for the shares has been running six times higher than the number available, according to Bloomberg, as cited by MarketWatch. To get an allocation, some investors may need to sell other liquid assets.

"In my view, the latest dip can be attributed to the opening of Anthropic's subscription books — which received six times more orders than shares available — pulling capital out of liquid markets," Seamus Rocca, CEO of Xapo Bank, told CoinDesk.

"When an IPO of this scale comes to market, the lure of a quick return is strong, and liquid assets like bitcoin are often the first source of funding when investors scramble for allocations," he added.

Thomas Perfumo, chief economist at Kraken, made a similar point to MarketWatch, saying the offering "could also be drawing capital out of risk assets as investors position ahead of the offering."

Analysts point to a broader retreat from risk

Not everyone buys a single explanation. The selloff follows turmoil around Nvidia after Jensen Huang's sudden departure, a slide we covered when bitcoin fell to a three-month low near $71,300 on Thursday. But several analysts told CoinDesk they see no direct link between the chipmaker and bitcoin.

"There's no direct impact," said Mark Connors, chief investment strategist at Risk Dimensions. "Gold's decline shows me it is a wholesale derisking deleveraging of the AI trade."

Chris Sullivan, co-portfolio manager at Hyperium Decimus, pointed instead to short open interest that has climbed above its August peak, heavy outflows from BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, extreme fear in crypto markets and the prospect of a 50-basis-point rate hike within 30 days.

That rate fear has been building since October's hot inflation print revived bets on a December Fed hike. Analysts at Bitfinex Alpha told MarketWatch the evidence "points more to a retreat from risk than a loss of conviction in bitcoin itself," with leverage and ETF outflows amplifying the move.

Jim Ferraioli, head of crypto research at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, noted to CoinDesk that the sharpest leg of the drop came around 11 p.m. Eastern, timing that suggests neither the Nvidia news nor the Strategy index story was necessarily the trigger.

ETF money keeps walking out

Spot bitcoin ETFs have been a steady source of selling. CoinDesk, analyzing SoSoValue data, said the U.S.-listed funds are now $1.56 billion in the red for 2026 in net flows.

The turn was fast. The funds were up about $1.01 billion for the year on October 29, then lost $643.3 million on October 30 alone. Weekly exits did the rest: $643.6 million this week through Thursday, $1.28 billion the week before and $202.6 million the week before that.

CoinDesk counted this as the 12th week of 2026 with net outflows above $500 million, against 15 such weeks in all of 2025 and four in 2024. Those two earlier years still ended with net inflows of $21.37 billion and $35.24 billion.

Bitcoin-linked stocks have followed the coins lower. MarketWatch, citing FactSet, said Coinbase shares were off 5.5% this week and Strategy was down 13.6%.

The SpaceX playbook, and why it may not repeat

Bulls have a recent precedent to lean on. In the weeks before SpaceX's $75 billion debut on June 12, bitcoin fell from over $80,000 to under $70,000, MarketWatch reported.

Strive CEO Matt Cole said on X, as reported by CoinDesk, that bitcoin fell 19% in the 50 days before SpaceX listed, compared with an 18% drop over the same stretch ahead of Anthropic. After SpaceX went public, bitcoin bottomed 18 days later and was up 28% from the listing price by day 100.

"If Anthropic follows the same pattern, most of the drawdown is behind us, and it could reverse quickly over the next couple of months," Cole said. A repeat would put bitcoin near $90,000 by late February, by his math.

CoinDesk cautioned that the comparison is imperfect: the summer decline also coincided with worries about bitcoin sales from Michael Saylor's Strategy, so the IPO was not the only factor at play then either.

What to watch next

The first test is Sunday's weekly close. BeInCrypto put the 200-week simple moving average near $67,922, while Bitfinex Alpha placed it at $67,800. Bitfinex said a weekly close above roughly $68,000 could keep the long-term trend bullish.

"A close below the 200-week SMA would suggest that bitcoin is currently trading as a rate-sensitive risk asset rather than a long-horizon store of value," the Bitfinex analysts told MarketWatch.

If that level fails, BeInCrypto flagged $66,000 to $67,000 as the first floor, then $62,300, a price buyers defended twice this year. On the upside, $75,000 is the first hurdle.

After that, the calendar is crowded. Anthropic's listing could land next week, MSCI is set to drop Strategy from its indexes on November 30, and the Federal Reserve announces its next rate decision on December 9. With longs absorbing most of the recent liquidations, bullish traders carry the most exposure into all three.