Oil breaks $100 and the AI sell-off spills into crypto: Strategy tumbles 9% as bitcoin slips back to $81,000

Bitcoin's Friday recovery ran into a wall of bad news from outside crypto. US crude oil climbed about 3% to $100.87 a barrel by early afternoon in New York, Bloomberg reported, after a bill in Congress sought to block President Trump's deal to release more Russian diesel onto world markets. The Nasdaq 100 dropped 2% and the S&P 500 0.9% as doubts about the returns on AI spending pushed chip stocks lower for an eighth straight session, their longest losing run since 2008. The 10-year Treasury yield rose to about 5.10%.

Bitcoin had climbed back above $82,000 in the morning, reaching about $82,711 at 7:22am Eastern according to Yahoo Finance. By 1:47pm it was at about $81,368, down 0.8% on the day, with ether at about $2,422, per Bloomberg.

Crypto-linked shares fell much harder. Strategy dropped 9.2% to $136.37, Securitize 13.4%, Bullish 5.9%, Circle 4% and Coinbase 3.5% around 1pm Eastern, CoinDesk reported.

Fund flows offered little support. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in a net $5.06 million on Thursday after $261 million left on Wednesday, while ether funds lost another $60.22 million, according to SoSoValue figures reported by Bitcoin.com News. Inflation worries remain the backdrop: traders put the odds of an October Fed rate hike at about 15% on Friday morning, down from nearly 45% right after Wednesday's consumer price report, CoinDesk reported.