Bitcoin back above $61,000 after rout leads to $1.6 billion liquidations

Bitcoin reclaimed the $61,000 level in Asian morning hours Saturday after briefly dipping below $60,000 overnight, steadying after a strong U.S. jobs report on Friday triggered a sharp selloff across stocks, bonds and crypto.

The token fell as low as $59,227 before buyers stepped back in, and was trading around $61,000, down about 1.3% on the day.

The bounce came off a level traders had been watching closely. Bitcoin had been sliding toward $60,000 all week as a record run of ETF outflows and Strategy's first bitcoin sale since 2022 removed buyers that had supported the price. The break below the round number overnight did not turn into a deeper breakdown, with the token recovering more than $1,500 off the low.

The selloff that drove the dip started outside crypto. Friday's nonfarm payrolls report came in solid, and rather than cheering the strength, markets repriced the Federal Reserve outlook hard. Swaps now fully price a rate increase by the end of 2026, a reversal from the cuts expected under newly confirmed chair Kevin Warsh. Two-year Treasury yields jumped 12 basis points to 4.16%, the dollar rose, and risk assets fell.

The damage was worst in the AI trade. The Nasdaq 100 sank about 5%, its steepest drop since April 2025, and a gauge of chipmakers tumbled 10%. The S&P 500 fell 2.6% and failed to complete a tenth straight weekly gain.

Other tokens remain deep in the red on the week. Ether is down 21.6% over seven days to around $1,575, solana down 23.7% to $63, and XRP, dogecoin and BNB all between 13% and 20% lower. Hyperliquid's HYPE, which outperformed through most of the recent bleed, is down 9.9% over the same stretch.

The leverage washout was heavy. Around $1.60 billion in positions were liquidated over 24 hours across roughly 308,000 traders, according to CoinGlass, with longs accounting for $1.21 billion. Bitcoin saw $534 million in liquidations and ether $423 million, while Zcash, in the middle of its own 44% collapse tied to a disclosed bug in its Orchard privacy pool, logged another $115 million.

With $60,000 pierced overnight but quickly reclaimed, the question is whether bitcoin can build on the bounce or whether the level gives way on a retest. A clean break below it would put the token back into territory it last traded during the February drawdown.