Bitcoin fell below $98 thousand after the collapse of shares of American AI companies

The cryptocurrency market started the week with a noticeable decline in the Bitcoin rate, which was driven by investor concerns about the overestimation of the dominant position of American companies in the field of artificial intelligence. According to Coin Metrics, the value of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency fell to $97,750 per coin, the CoinDesk 20 index fell almost 10%, and Nasdaq futures fell 4%.

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The cryptocurrency market has come under pressure as AI technology stocks have seen their valuations decline as their dominance comes into question. A few days ago, Chinese billionaire Liang Wenfeng’s startup DeepSeek unveiled its R1 reasoning AI model and published instructions that allow it to cost-effectively create a large language model (LLM) that can learn on its own without human supervision. This has raised concerns among investors about the ability of wealthy US companies to maintain a technological advantage in the field of AI.

Against this background, the Coinbase and Microstrategy shares fell into 6 % and 5 %, respectively. The securities of companies that are engaged in cryptocurrencies mining and invest in AI developers more significantly fell in price. So the Core Scientific shares lost 18.5 %in price, TERAWULF fell by 14 %, and Iren (previously known as Iris Energy) – by 10 %. It should be noted that some time after the start of the bidding, the bitcoin exchange rate stabilized and again exceeded the mark of $ 100 thousand per coin. At the time of publication of this note, about $ 100,545 (Coindesk data) was given for the most popular cryptocurrency of the world.

Image source: Coindesk

«Today’s 3% decline in Nasdaq futures prices (on news of DeepSeek) has stimulated the liquidation of digital assets. This relationship highlights the continued strong connection between digital assets and the technology sector. Bitcoin remains highly correlated with the Nasdaq, much more so than with gold,” said Standard Chartered analyst Jeff Kendrick.