Bitcoin Nears $60K Test as Zcash Selloff Deepens After Privacy-Pool Bug
Bitcoin traded just above $62,000 after a sharp weekly decline, putting the $60,000 level back in focus. Zcash also came under heavy pressure after disclosure of a critical Orchard privacy-pool vulnerability and a public exit by Arthur Hayes.
What happened?
Bitcoin traded just above $62,000 after a sharp weekly decline, putting the $60,000 level back in focus. Zcash also came under heavy pressure after disclosure of a critical Orchard privacy-pool vulnerability and a public exit by Arthur Hayes.
Why it matters
The pressure matters because several supports that had helped absorb earlier crypto drawdowns appeared weaker. CoinDesk reported that U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs had recorded 15 consecutive sessions of net outflows totaling more than $4.7 billion, while Strategy disclosed its first bitcoin sale since 2022, reducing the role of corporate buying as a market buffer.
Bitcoin was trading just over $62,000 on June 5, leaving it roughly $2,700 above the $60,000 level after falling nearly 16% from above $74,000 the prior week, according to CoinDesk. The move came as broader AI-linked risk appetite weakened globally, while Zcash’s ZEC token dropped as much as 37% over 24 hours after a critical bug was disclosed in its Orchard shielded pool.
The pressure matters because several supports that had helped absorb earlier crypto drawdowns appeared weaker. CoinDesk reported that U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs had recorded 15 consecutive sessions of net outflows totaling more than $4.7 billion, while Strategy disclosed its first bitcoin sale since 2022, reducing the role of corporate buying as a market buffer.
For bitcoin traders, the immediate focus was technical. CoinDesk said a break below $60,000 would put BTC back in territory last seen during February’s drawdown, with the next technical support closer to $55,000. The selloff also followed three sessions in which much of the recent damage occurred.
Zcash faced a separate confidence shock. Shielded Labs disclosed that a vulnerability in the Orchard privacy pool, active since Orchard’s May 2022 launch, could have allowed unlimited and undetectable counterfeit tokens. The bug was discovered on May 29 by security engineer Taylor Hornby using Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model and patched through an emergency fix by June 1.
Shielded Labs said there is no cryptographic way to determine whether the flaw was exploited before the fix, and it proposed a network upgrade with new accounting measures and broader security work to rebuild confidence in ZEC’s supply integrity. Arthur Hayes, founder of Maelstrom and former CEO of BitMEX, said he sold his entire Zcash position after reading about the exploit, citing the need for certainty in the privacy thesis behind his ZEC holding.