This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Starts Week Strong But Drops Hard Amid Wall Street Panic

It didn't take long for things to go pear-shaped. Bitcoin was closing in on its all-time high again on Monday after briefly touching $70,000 per coin on America's biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase.

But by Friday, it had dipped so, so low: Bitcoin has over the week dropped by more than 9% to $61,358—dipping as low as $60,704—according to CoinGecko.

The reason was in part down to a weak jobs report that sparked fears that the U.S. economy could be sliding into a recession, causing a Wall Street sell-off.

That, combined with tensions in the Middle East and prediction markets suggesting a slightly lower chance of Trump winning the election, pushed traders to get rid of their crypto investments, David Lawant, head of research at FalconX, told Decrypt.

This all came after a relatively optimistic meeting from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, where the central bank's chair Jerome Powell suggested that a long-awaited cut to historically high interest rates could come by September.

The silver lining? Bitcoin mining difficult hit a new all-time high, meaning the network is stronger than ever.

Elsewhere, the price of Ethereum also dropped hard over the week, despite exchange-traded funds launching last month and proving popular with Wall Street.

The second-biggest coin by market cap has dropped by 8% in seven days and entered the weekend priced at $2,963.

Solana also had a rough week, down over 7% to $151. Indeed, essentially all of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap were down over that span.

But hit the hardest have been the riskiest assets of them all: meme coins and tokens. Dogwifhat, the largest meme token running on Solana, has dropped the most by over 35% since this time a week ago. It's now priced at $1.68.  Meanwhile, Bonk is down by 22%.

Crypto policy was still the talk of the town with politicians, though. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) formally introduced a bill to establish a national Bitcoin reserve. And Republican nominee and ex-president Donald Trump said the federal government could wipe out its $35 trillion in debt with Bitcoin.

But just how that would work was not made clear by the next potential leader of the U.S.