News Block: Bitcoin Slides Below $60,000, Strategy Sells BTC for the First Time, Saylor Publishes Bitcoin's Ideological Roadmap

**Natalie Brunell** (0:01)
Welcome to the Coin Stories News Block, powered exclusively by Ledn. I'm Natalie Brunell, and in about 10 minutes or less, I'll provide you with insightful updates on Bitcoin, financial markets and the global economy. Everything you need to know in one block. Let's go.
Well, there's no sugarcoating it. This was a very rough week for Bitcoin. The price fell below $60,000 at one point, its lowest level since early February. That puts it more than 52% below the all time high of 126,000 set last October. Over $1.1 billion in long positions were liquidated in a single 24-hour window. And since May 20th, spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen more than $3 billion in net outflows across 10 consecutive trading days. Whales, which are addresses holding between 10 and 10,000 Bitcoin, dumped nearly 25,000 coins in the past week alone. So what's driving the selling? Well, a few things are converging at once. First, there's a massive liquidity vacuum forming. SpaceX is targeting a $75 billion raise on June 12th. Anthropic just filed its S1. OpenAI is expected to go public later this year, and trillions of dollars in new AI listings are competing for the same pool of institutional capital. So right now, that capital is rotating out of Bitcoin and into AI. The smart money is raising cash for these IPOs, and Bitcoin is one of the things they're selling to do it.
Second, the macro picture hasn't gotten any friendlier. The Fed is holding interest rates steady, and the next FOMC meeting on June 16th will be Kevin Warsh's first as Fed chair. Inflation is running at 3.8% year over year, driven partly by nearly 18% surge in energy prices tied to the ongoing Iran conflict. The peace talks there keep stalling, and the longer the conflict drags on, the longer global trade stays disrupted and oil prices stay elevated. In that environment, the rate cuts the market had been hoping for are not on the table. And third, Strategy. The company that has built its entire identity around never selling Bitcoin sold 32 Bitcoin last week. It was only 2.5 million, a fraction of a fraction of their 843,000 coin stack. But it was the first disclosed sale since 2022 and the symbolism rattled people. The filing was clear. Proceeds funded dividend payments on preferred stock. And this shouldn't have been a surprise. Strategy told the market on last quarter's earnings call that it could sell Bitcoin for tax loss harvesting or when doing so would benefit shareholders on a Bitcoin per share basis. This was the playbook working as described. But of course, Bitcoin bears like Peter Schiff predictably pounced. The reality is that 32 coins out of 843,000 is 0.004%.
To put the sale into perspective, Strategy acquired nearly 90,000 Bitcoin in Q1 of this year alone. So what matters is that they continue to be a massive net buyer over the long term. And this wouldn't be the first time Strategy has weathered a bear market and come out of it much stronger on the other side. I see this as a stress test for Strategy to prove the resilience of the business model they pioneered. And Saylor already hinted at another Bitcoin purchase on Sunday morning. So let's see if Strategy delivers again.
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Now, amid all of this selling and fear, Michael Saylor did something interesting. Instead of talking about the price, he published an essay. It's called The Four Ideologies of Bitcoin. And I think it's one of the most important things he's written. Saylor breaks the Bitcoin community into four camps. Number one, maximalists who see Bitcoin as the dominant digital monetary network, sound money, a tool against inflation, debasement and monetary chaos.
Number two, capitalists who want Bitcoin woven into banks, credit markets, corporate treasuries and global financial infrastructure.
Third, technologists who focus on protocol upgrades and building the technical foundation for Bitcoin's next chapter.
And fourth, fundamentalists who guard Bitcoin's decentralized core and push back against anything that threatens self-custody, censorship resistance or the protocol's integrity. His argument isn't that one camp is right and the others are wrong. It's that Bitcoin needs all four working in tension with each other to succeed at a global scale. As Saylor put it, quote, the mission is not to choose between purity and adoption or between innovation and stability. The mission is to ensure that Bitcoin remains Bitcoin while the world builds on it. Now, that's a message worth sitting with, especially in a week where the price is making people question everything again. Because here's the thing, the price, yes, it's down 50% from the highs. That's painful. But Bitcoin's monetary policy hasn't changed. The supply cap hasn't changed. The network keeps producing blocks every 10 minutes or so, whether the price is at 60,000 or 126,000. What Saylor is really saying is stop looking at the price and start looking at the architecture. The banks that are building on Bitcoin, the credit markets forming around it, the protocol that securely keeps running, and the people who protect its core principles are still doing that work. Bear markets are where conviction gets tested, and right now, the market is finding who actually believes in what they own.