Blame MSTR for the Bitcoin Crash? The Culprit May Lie Elsewhere

Strategy disillusionment, phantom whales, the AI boom; everyone has a finger to point when it comes to crypto’s recent price crashout.

Bitcoin just had its worst week since late 2024.

It fell below $60,000 on Friday, tagged its 200-week moving average, and ripcorded a wicked $200 billion out of the market over a few short, brutal days.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have bled around $4.4 billion across a record ~two week period, with assets falling from $104 billion to $83 billion. On June 4 alone, the market liquidated more than $1.5 billion in leveraged long positions.

And just like that, everyone is suddenly scrambling to find a villain. Common wisdom initially blamed Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which recently sold 32 BTC (~$2.5 million) in late May — its first sale since 2022. At roughly 0.0038% of the company’s total stack though, the sale was more of a rounding error. It may have dented sentiment, but certainly not supply.

Others side-eyed an ancient wallet linked to the long-shuttered Mt. Gox exchange which moved 10,422 BTC on June 2. But as analyst Merlijn Trader pointed out, “the coins went to a new, unmarked wallet. Not an exchange. Not a custodian. No sale… The fear is real. The selling, so far, is not.”

As boring and unglamorous as it may be, the move probably doesn’t have much to do with anything in the news. The only story with any real teeth is the narrative around AI. Saylor himself said, “Capital markets are funding the AI buildout at historic scale: ~$400B over 6 months […] This is a capital rotation, not a Bitcoin impairment.”

In the rest of this issue, subscribers get:

• The AI rotation, interrogated: what the SpaceX and Anthropic mega-IPOs are actually doing to crypto’s bid — and the honest caveat most hot takes skip
• The real engine behind the four-year cycle: why it was never just the halving, and the liquidity signal that called this leg down months in advance
• Where the cycle bottoms: the onchain line that has marked every prior bear-market low — and why it hasn’t fired yet
• Bull, base, and bear cases with explicit price targets: ranging from the floor-is-in camp to one institution’s mass drawdown scenario
• Six signals to watch: the specific levels that will tell you which scenario is most likely playing out

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