Friday Bitcoin closed at just $59,948 — dropping 19% just for June and more than 50% lower than its record high in October of $124,310. To commemorate the occasion CNBC interviewed long-time bitcoin skeptic Jeremy Grantham, reporting that the 87-year-old cofounder/chief investment strategist of the massive asset-management firm GMO is "predicting it will gradually fade into irrelevance over decades." [The] longtime market commentator known for his calls on asset bubbles said bitcoin is a "useless, speculative" asset without intrinsic value, speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Friday. He also said bitcoin hasn't outperformed during a bull market and questioned its practical use. "[Over] years and years, decades and decades, it will dwindle away, I suspect — not with a bang, but a whimper," he said. "It's not a stable form of value — it just halved ... for no particular reason in a strong economy, so you can't depend on it in that way." He added that gold has still delivered solid gains over the same period, even after pulling back from its highs. Bitcoin not only hasn't proved itself as a useful asset to speculate on, it doesn't provide any real world utility either, Grantham argued. "People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket. ... What it does is allows crooks to move money around," he said. Bitcoin has become notorious over the years for its dramatic bear market crashes, which has taken it down at least 70% from its peak in every cycle. The article adds that "many investors believe the current price slump could drag on for several more months."

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The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there's more bad news, reports CNBC." "Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025." While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first place, [says Daniel Sotiroff, associate director of ETF and Passive Strategies Research at Morningstar]. Here's what he and other experts have to say about the case for holding crypto, and how much exposure is appropriate for the average investor... Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says. Sotiroff agrees that bitcoin is difficult to value using traditional financial metrics. "The best analogy I've heard is that it's more like a collectible, because it's basically worth what other people are going to pay for it," he says. Sotiroff told CNBC the recent selloff was a reminder that bitcoin's gains can be accompanied by equally dramatic declines — one reason many financial planners recommend limiting exposure to a small portion of a broader portfolio. "You just really can't make a call on what direction it's going to go," says Sotiroff.

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An upcoming vote in a few weeks on America's cryptocurrency "Clarity Act" is "rattling Wall Street and consumer advocates," reports CNN, with its proposal to regulate the bulk of crypto markets through America's Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "It allows crypto companies to operate, at long last, in compliance with U.S. rules, rather than what they have been doing — essentially running their businesses within a patchwork of state and federal legal gray areas." Even for Jamie Dimon, the banking titan who's not known to mince words, it was a surprising shot across the bow when he described a fellow financier as "full of sh*t." "No one's gonna bow down to this guy or that company," Dimon told Fox Business last week. "This guy" being Brian Armstrong, and "that company" being cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The Dimon-Armstrong tension isn't new, but it is boiling over publicly as the Senate inches closer to a floor vote on the crypto industry's No. 1 legislative priority, known as the Clarity Act. Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic, broadly supports crypto regulation but takes issue with a provision in the Clarity Act that would allow companies like Coinbase to "effectively pay interest on deposits... without the protection they should have." The spicy comment about Armstrong came after Dimon rattled off other concerns about the Clarity Act, including what he sees as its insufficient anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer safeguards that banks have had in place for decades... "If (Armstrong) takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules," Dimon said in the Fox Business interview... The immediate concern from banks (and many consumer advocates) is that crypto exchanges like Coinbase would, in the grand tradition of Silicon Valley innovation, lure customers in with huge rewards and then phase those benefits out over time. Deposits in a crypto exchange are also not insured by the federal government the way bank deposits are, but that's the kind of fine print that customers tend to overlook until it's too late. JPMorgan Chase spokesperson Trish Wexler underscored that the bank wants the bill to pass, with some "fixes," like prohibiting rewards on stablecoin holdings and strengthening anti-money-laundering guardrails. Coinbase's CEO responded in an interview with Politico: Armstrong pointed to restrictions on rewards paid to idle cryptocurrency balances and disclosures on stablecoins as part of a handful of policies included in the bill to appease the banking industry's requests. "I think it'd be good for the banks," Armstrong said of the bill. "It would be great for crypto companies as well ... Hopefully we can get past the absolutisms and just see if we can get this bill over the finish line." But CNN notes concerns about weaving cryptocurrency — "a historically self-contained financial system prone to stomach-churning booms and busts" — more deeply into America's traditional finance infrastructure: "It's not just a crypto story, it's a broad deregulation of our securities markets story," Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in banking and cryptocurrency, said in an interview. And that should concern everyone, Allen says, even if they have no investments at all, because "if we get a financial crisis in this space... no one comes out of that unscathed."

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Bitcoin briefly fell below $60,000 on Friday, "extending its weekly loss to nearly 20% and threatening to fall below $59,000," reports CoinDesk. Crypto was also hit by a 40%-plus plunge in Zcash after Shielded Labs disclosed a years-old bug that could have allowed undetected counterfeit ZEC creation. From the report: Now, with stocks in plunge mode -- the Nasdaq down nearly 4% on Friday -- bitcoin finds itself perfectly correlated. "Short term, Bitcoin feels like swallowing broken glass," wrote Jeff Swanson Friday. "The chart goes up. It goes down. It makes grown men cry into their Robinhood accounts and CNBC anchors smugly declare the funeral, for the eleventh time." "Here's what uncomfortable people don't understand: the discomfort is the yield. Every paper-handed panic seller is handing their future to someone with a longer time horizon and a colder storage device." [...] Earlier, Shielded Labs, a nonprofit developer on the privacy token system, disclosed a critical vulnerability in Zcash's (ZEC) Orchard privacy pool that could have threatened the integrity of the token's supply. The vulnerability, if exploited, could have allowed an attacker to create an unlimited number of counterfeit ZEC tokens, completely undetected. "Think of it as someone secretly gaining access to the Federal Reserve's dollar printing press, except in this case, even the Fed wouldn't be able to tell these extra dollars were printed," wrote Omkar Godbole. Importantly, the vulnerability was discovered with help from Anthropic's recently released Opus 4.8 AI model, raising difficult questions for the entire crypto industry. More to come on that. ZEC is now down 42% over the past 24 hours. On Wednesday, the Zcash Foundation said: "The vulnerability was caught before any known exploitation occurred. There is no evidence of unauthorized value creation. Zcash's turnstile mechanism (which tracks the total ZEC balance across all value pools) confirmed that the total supply remained intact throughout. User privacy was not affected. Sapling and transparent transactions continued operating normally throughout the incident."

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En à peine quelques minutes, un individu a décidé de sacrifier 107 bitcoins qu’il conservait précieusement depuis 2014. Un geste visiblement délibéré qui plonge la sphère crypto dans une incompréhension totale.