Bitcoin closed the New York session at $79,340 on Friday afternoon, capping a week in which the largest cryptocurrency by market value had run as high as $82,000 on Tuesday before retreating each session through to the weekend. The pullback wiped out roughly $50 billion in market capitalisation across the top one hundred digital assets but left the year-to-date gain for bitcoin intact at twenty-three per cent.
The week's peak had been driven by the perception that the United States and Iran were edging toward a longer-term ceasefire framework, which traders read as removing one of the principal hedging cases for holding bitcoin. The Friday morning naval clash in the Strait of Hormuz initially weighed on prices but the strong April jobs report and the renewed equity-market rally pulled capital back into stocks and out of the crypto complex.
Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded a net outflow of $720 million across the week, the first weekly net redemption since the second week of February. The bulk of the outflow came from BlackRock's IBIT product on Thursday and Friday, although the same fund recorded the largest single-day inflow of the year on Tuesday at the height of the rally. The two largest spot ether products held at small net inflows.
Ether tracked bitcoin lower, slipping to $3,140 by the New York close from a Tuesday high of $3,420. Solana, the third-largest cryptocurrency by market value, fell more than ten per cent over the week to $176 after a brief network outage on Wednesday morning that the foundation attributed to a misconfigured validator software upgrade. The broader CoinDesk 20 index ended the week down four per cent.
Trading desks at Cumberland and at Galaxy Digital said in research notes published on Friday that the next clear technical level for bitcoin was the $77,500 area that had served as support through April, and that a sustained break below it would set up a test of the psychologically important $75,000 mark. None of the three largest dealers reported significant client interest in protective put structures over the week.