Bitcoin briefly fell below $60,000 on Friday, extending its weekly loss to nearly 20% and threatening to drop below $59,000, CoinDesk reported.
The wider crypto market also came under pressure after Zcash fell more than 40% following Shielded Labs’ disclosure of a year-old bug that could have allowed undetected counterfeit ZEC creation.
Bitcoin moved in line with falling stocks on Friday, with the Nasdaq down nearly 4%, according to the report.
Jeff Swanson wrote Friday that Bitcoin’s short-term price action has become painful for investors, with sharp moves in both directions and renewed claims from market commentators that the asset is finished.
He also argued that the discomfort is part of the return for long-term holders, adding that panic sellers are giving up future upside to investors with a longer time horizon and stronger custody habits.
Shielded Labs, a nonprofit developer on the privacy token system, disclosed a critical vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard privacy pool.
The bug could have threatened the integrity of Zcash’s supply. If exploited, it could have allowed an attacker to create an unlimited number of counterfeit ZEC tokens without detection.
Omkar Godbole compared the issue to someone secretly gaining access to a central bank’s money-printing system, while the system itself would not be able to detect the extra supply.
The vulnerability was discovered with help from Anthropic’s recently released Opus 4.8 AI model, raising difficult questions for the crypto industry. ZEC was down 42% over the past 24 hours.
The Zcash Foundation said Wednesday that the vulnerability was found before any known exploitation occurred.
It said there was no evidence of unauthorized value creation.
The foundation also said Zcash’s turnstile mechanism, which tracks the total ZEC balance across all value pools, confirmed that the total supply remained intact throughout the incident.
User privacy was not affected, while Sapling and transparent transactions continued operating normally during the incident, the foundation said.