Written by: Shannon@金财经

BTC has plummeted recently, falling below $62,000 on the morning of June 4.

Bitcoin has retreated from its all-time high of $126,277 in October 2025 and has been struggling to recover for several months, once recovering to $82,000 in May. The recent sharp decline has completely erased the losses regained in May.

The current BTC price has fallen by more than 51% compared to the historical high in 2025.

What is even more frustrating is that the performance of BTC this time is in sharp contrast to the hot AI stocks.

In 2026, the narrative of AI infrastructure in the U.S. stock market continues to heat up and hit new highs repeatedly; while BTC continues to fall, disappointing investors who once believed that encryption is a tool for hedging traditional market risks.

This departure itself is worth pondering.

1. The embarrassing situation of BTC: Why has BTC become the reverse target of AI stocks?

The essence of this phenomenon is not that "BTC has become worse", but that the asset attributes of BTC have fundamentally changed after institutionalization, which happens to form a structural capital hedge with the rise of AI stocks.

Three paths work simultaneously.

Path 1: Competition for funds, AI stocks have something that BTC can never provide

The rotation of AI stocks has sucked in a lot of money - hedge funds and asset managers continue to pour into AI semiconductor, cloud computing and infrastructure stocks. These targets provide visible revenue growth and profit forecast revisions, which are more direct fundamental logic than BTC.

And BTC has no profit, no cash flow, and no dividends. As the S&P and Nasdaq repeatedly hit new highs in the AI wave, the opportunity cost of holding a highly volatile asset that does not generate income has increased sharply.

This is a fundamental valuation competition.

AI infrastructure stocks are currently showing tangible revenue growth, order backlog narrative, and capex cycles, visibility that investors can model. This visibility is amplified by index concentration: Rise in individual large-cap stocks drives the entire benchmark index higher, and passive funding reinforces the winner effect.

To put it more bluntly, when Nvidia has EPS growth and GPU orders from ultra-large-scale customers, and BTC can only rely on "scarcity narratives" to support its valuation, in a world with limited risk budgets, the direction of the funds is clear.

AI is no longer a narrative theme, but the dominant capital allocation direction in 2026. Nvidia, TSMC and Broadcom now account for more share of the global asset market capitalization rankings than the cryptocurrency’s all-time peak.

A more accurate statement is that the current market valuation stage belongs to a "profit-led period."

AI companies have high revenue visibility, interest rate expectations are relatively stable, and the market does not need to look for "liquidity substitutes." In this environment, assets with real cash flow prevail, while purely narrative assets with no cash flow are under pressure. BTC belongs to the latter, and AI stocks belong to the former.

Path 2: Institutionalization is a double-edged sword

This is the most core path and the most counter-intuitive.

The birth of Bitcoin ETF was once regarded as a milestone for BTC to become mainstream, but it also incorporated BTC into the unified fund pool of institutional asset management. In 2026-2027, BTC has become one of the assets with the highest beta coefficient in the global risk opening/closing cycle, closely linked to stocks, interest rates, liquidity conditions and geopolitics.

This means that when institutions need funds to buy AI stocks, BTC is the most convenient "cash machine".

Currently, SpaceX, Musk’s big star stock, is in a critical period for listing. It will have a road show on June 4 and is expected to be listed on June 12. SpaceX alone will raise US$75 billion. In the second half of 2026, U.S. stocks will also usher in a wave of super IPOs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Investors are expected to hoard large amounts of cash to snap up these stocks.

According to Farside data, the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF recently set a record for the longest continuous withdrawal of capital since its listing in January 2024, with cumulative outflows reaching US$4.21 billion in three weeks.

The key to the problem is that these outflows are not because investors are not optimistic about the long-term logic of BTC, but are purely position rebalancing.

AI chip stocks have risen, do you need to chase positions? Sell ​​BTC.

Reducing risk appetite and need to reduce positions? Sell ​​BTC first.

BTC’s high liquidity, 24-hour tradability, and no lock-up period make it the preferred tool for institutions to adjust risk exposures.

Path Three: BTC’s Structural Weakness

When external financial pressure strikes, structural problems within the BTC market cause the decline to far exceed reasonable levels.

The high leverage that exists in the microstructure of BTC. Higher leverage and 24-hour trading mechanisms in crypto markets can turn pullbacks into cascading declines.

On May 19, BTC fell to an intraday low of US$76,270 in a single day, and was forced to liquidate its positions on that day, amounting to approximately US$650 million to US$700 million. This is the classic negative feedback chain of "sellers selling → triggering stop loss → more forced liquidations → prices continue to fall".

What are the conditions required for reversal?

BTC’s recovery may require a clear shift in capital flows or a macro easing impulse. Signals worth monitoring include daily ETF net purchases/redemptions, futures funding rates and basis trends, U.S. interest rate and liquidity indicators, miner selling behavior, and realized correlation shifts with leading AI stocks—signals that often precede narrative shifts.

In short, BTC needs to wait for the next "liquidity easing cycle" to start.

When the Federal Reserve turns to easing again and market risk appetite increases due to ample liquidity rather than profit-driven, the inverse relationship between BTC and AI stocks may be reversed again.

High beta attributes will then become an advantage, not a liability.

However, while BTC fell sharply, the crypto market experienced structural differentiation. Some smaller emerging currencies did not follow the fall, but bucked the trend and rose sharply, especially Near, HYPE and ZEC.

The contrarian logic of two or three "dark horses"

NEAR: AI narrative and infrastructure scarcity

In the broader market correction, tokens with AI as the core narrative such as NEAR Protocol significantly outperformed Bitcoin, with NEAR's highest single-day increase of 16%. Investors' attention turned to projects with substantive decentralized AI applications and scalable infrastructure.

NEAR surged more than 54% in the seven days leading up to May 27, in part because BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes listed it as one of his "holy trinity" altcoins on May 22.

NEAR’s core competitiveness is that it is one of the few L1 networks that truly combines AI computing with blockchain. Its Nightshare sharding technology brings 600 millisecond block time, ultra-low fees, and native support for AI integration; it has approximately 46 million to 51 million monthly active users, ranking among the top among L1 projects. In addition, the transaction volume of NEAR Intents has exceeded 19 billion US dollars, and a dynamic re-sharding upgrade will be launched in June 2026. NEAR sells not expectations, but products that are already working.

HYPE: The real return flywheel of on-chain derivatives

Hyperliquid (HYPE) broke through $75 in June 2026, achieving a return of nearly 200% during the year, significantly outperforming Bitcoin. While most markets are still in the red for the year, HYPE has recorded stellar gains over the past 24 hours, seven days and throughout 2026.

There is a rare phenomenon behind the rise of HYPE: a positive diversion of institutional funds. When Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs experienced large-scale outflows, HYPE's ETF products experienced institutional panic buying.

HYPE is not an "air narrative". Hyperliquid is an on-chain perpetual contract exchange with a daily trading volume exceeding US$1 billion. Its protocol fees will regularly repurchase and destroy HYPE tokens, forming a real value capture flywheel. While the TVL of Ethereum and other L1s was declining, Hyperliquid’s TVL bucked the trend and climbed to $1.5 billion.

This is an asset that can be understood using traditional financial thinking. It has revenue, users, and a token destruction mechanism.

ZEC: The institutional rebirth of privacy assets

ZEC’s story has the clearest narrative logic among the three.

Zcash (ZEC) hit a peak of $690 on May 24, 2026, achieving an increase of more than 1,500% from the low in 2025, surpassing Monero to become the privacy coin with the largest market value.

There are multiple catalysts behind ZEC’s rise: Grayscale applied to convert its Zcash trust into the first spot privacy currency ETF in the United States (code: ZCSH) on May 12, 2026; the SEC closed its nearly two-year investigation of the Zcash Foundation on January 15, 2026, and failed to enforce the law.

At the Consensus Miami conference, Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain disclosed that he has established a significant ZEC position and pointed out that as more and more financial activities are moved to the chain, private value storage tools like ZEC will become increasingly important.

Approximately 30% of the ZEC supply is currently locked in the Shielded Pool, a significant increase from 8% in 2024; the halving in November 2024 will reduce the inflation rate from 4% to 2%; the upcoming FCMP++ upgrade is expected to bring a 300% throughput improvement.

The core logic of institutions adding positions in ZEC is that in an era where AI surveillance is becoming increasingly common, privacy is no longer the exclusive need of criminals, but an infrastructure for the protection of business secrets and compliant financial privacy. ZEC’s selective disclosure model (auditable but not public) meets this need exactly.

3. The deep logic of crypto market differentiation

This differentiation is essentially a narrative revaluation.

In the past bull market cycle, the logic of "buying BTC is equivalent to buying crypto" was established. BTC is the main riser, and altcoins follow suit.

But the situation in 2026 has undergone structural changes.

BTC is becoming more and more like a macro asset. Its rise and fall depend on the Federal Reserve, ETF capital flows and global liquidity, rather than fundamental innovations within the crypto industry.

The market is increasingly incorporating macro liquidity, interest rate expectations and stock market sentiment into BTC pricing.

At the same time, NEAR, HYPE, and ZEC represent three completely different fundamental tracks. Their rises have independent catalysts and do not require the cooperation of BTC.

This is a sign of the maturity of the crypto market. Funds are beginning to discover value like the stock market, instead of following the general rise and fall of leading companies.

The encryption market in 2026 is undergoing a profound paradigm shift.

On the one hand, BTC faces fierce funding competition from AI stocks.

On the other hand, the crypto market is experiencing structural differentiation, and some crypto assets with real income and users that meet the needs of the AI era, rather than just narratives, may perform against the trend.