Zcash, Bittensor, and Ethereum Stall After Sunday’s Short Squeeze

Bitcoin held above $63,000 at press time Monday after a 4% Sunday rebound from briefly below $60,000, but the three altcoins that led that advance, Zcash (ZEC), Bittensor (TAO), and Ethereum (ETH), each hit key technical resistance Monday morning and stopped. Per CoinGlass data, $665 million in liquidations ran through the previous 24 hours, with $528 million coming from short positions, consistent with a short squeeze rather than new capital entering the market. Friday’s blowout U.S. jobs report delivered a macro shift that Sunday’s candles didn’t undo.

May non-farm payrolls added 172,000 jobs, nearly double the 85,000 consensus forecast per Bureau of Labor Statistics data released June 5. That number immediately repriced rate-hike odds and drove Bitcoin to an intraday low of $59,100. By Monday, ZEC, TAO, and ETH had each recovered from their weekly lows but sat below the exponential moving average (EMA) clusters their charts had flagged as resistance for weeks.

A May Jobs Report With Two Price Tags

The U.S. economy added 172,000 non-farm payroll jobs in May, with unemployment holding at 4.3% and prior-month figures revised upward by a combined 93,000. BNP Paribas, responding that afternoon, abandoned its stable-policy forecast and began projecting three Federal Reserve rate hikes starting in December, citing persistent inflation at 3.8%, firm employment conditions, and the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict’s upward pressure on energy costs.

• 172,000 non-farm jobs added in May vs. 85,000 expected (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• $1.7 billion in crypto liquidations on June 5, per CoinGlass
• 52% Polymarket probability of a Fed rate hike before year-end
• 42.7% CME FedWatch odds for higher rates by December

Bitcoin fell to $59,100 on June 5, its lowest level since 2024, extending a 10-day slide of roughly $19,000 from recent highs. More than $155 million in long positions were forced out in a single hour; the 24-hour total topped $1.7 billion, per crypto.news reporting on Bitcoin’s jobs-data selloff and liquidation cascade. The Alternative.me Fear and Greed Index fell to 12, its lowest reading in months. The 10-year Treasury yield jumped above 4.5%, a 12-month high, and the 2-year yield climbed to 4.16%.

The $63,000 level held by Monday morning, but rate-hike probability readings on prediction markets hadn’t moved since Friday’s close. CME FedWatch stayed at 42.7% and Polymarket at 52%.

Zcash and the Orchard Ceiling

The Emergency Fix

Zcash dropped to $264.80 on June 5 with two catalysts at work simultaneously. A broad liquidation cascade swept every risk asset, and a second, ZEC-specific disclosure added to the pressure: confirmation from Shielded Labs that a flaw in the Orchard shielded pool, Zcash’s zero-knowledge proof circuit for fully encrypted transactions, could theoretically have allowed unlimited counterfeit ZEC creation if exploited before the fix went live.

Security researcher Taylor Hornby identified the vulnerability on May 29, during an AI-assisted code audit. The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) responded with a two-stage emergency upgrade: a soft fork (Zebra 4.5.3) disabled Orchard at block 3,363,426 on June 2, and the NU6.2 hard fork at block 3,364,600 on June 3 permanently corrected the zero-knowledge proof circuit. No exploitation was detected at any point, per Shielded Labs. Zcash’s turnstile mechanism, a supply-integrity check built into the protocol, confirmed circulating supply remained intact throughout the incident, per CryptoTimes’ analysis of the Orchard vulnerability and ZEC’s immediate market response.

The privacy from AI, govt, big tech narrative demands perfection not improbability.

Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder, posted that statement on X on June 5 as he disclosed his complete ZEC exit. Despite calling exploitation “extremely unlikely,” Hayes argued that privacy-focused assets require a higher certainty standard than probability estimates can provide. His exit dropped ZEC’s market-cap ranking from 11th to 18th. On-chain data platform Lookonchain showed a newly created wallet withdrawing 37,316 ZEC, roughly $13.1 million, from Binance shortly after the crash, suggesting at least one large buyer viewed the $264 area as an entry point.

Monday’s Technical Picture

ZEC recovered above $400 through Sunday and into Monday, carrying the coin past its 100-day EMA at $428 and into the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement at $438, where it stalled. On the daily chart, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) sits near 42 and has been trending lower through the recovery; the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator sits below its zero line with the histogram expanding.

Immediate support runs from the 100-day EMA at $428 down to a structural band around the 50% Fibonacci retracement of $372, with the 200-day EMA at $364 as the deeper floor. The 50-day EMA at $485 and the $500 level both sit above the current 61.8% test, and the coin hasn’t closed above $438 on the daily chart. The Zcash shielded pool held a record 5.1 million ZEC before the crash, cited by holders as evidence of growing adoption of shielded transactions, but that metric hasn’t changed the coin’s technical position this week.

Bittensor’s $236 Wall

Bittensor (TAO), a decentralized AI protocol that allocates token rewards to machine-learning models based on competitive performance across its validator subnets, staged a 10% Sunday rebound to above $200. Monday found TAO in the same zone, RSI near 36, MACD still negative. The first obstacle overhead is $236, which held as support before Friday’s crash and has since flipped to resistance.

The larger barrier is the EMA cluster. TAO’s 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day EMAs sit at approximately $256, $259, and $269 respectively, forming a compressed supply band roughly 28% above Monday’s price. A close back below $200 would expose the February 24, 2026 low of $163. Grayscale and Bitwise, two major crypto asset managers, filed spot TAO exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications on April 28, 2026; Grayscale’s Bittensor Trust was trading at a roughly 50% premium to net asset value at the time of filing, per Traders Union, a financial analysis platform, reflecting institutional demand that had outpaced available trust inventory well before this week’s selloff. The SEC decision window is expected around August 2026. Approximately 70% of TAO tokens are currently staked in the protocol, limiting circulating supply, but neither development interrupted the downward price trend this week.

Ethereum and the Death Cross

Death Cross and Falling RSI

Ethereum hovers below $1,700 Monday with a confirmed death cross in effect since late May, when the 50-day EMA crossed below the 200-day EMA. That pattern has specific historical weight for ETH: in both the 2018 and 2022 bear markets, a confirmed death cross preceded months of additional decline before any recovery gained traction, per TechTimes’ documentation of Ethereum’s death cross history and current ETF outflow context.

On the daily chart, the RSI sits at 28, in oversold territory, while the MACD and signal lines remain deep in negative territory with an expanding histogram. ETH fell 10.8% on June 5, more than double Bitcoin’s same-day 5.3% decline, reflecting Ethereum-specific selling on top of the macro hit. The ETH/BTC ratio compressed through the selloff as capital rotated toward Bitcoin within the crypto space. Initial resistance sits at the February 6, 2026 low of $1,747, followed by the 50-day EMA near $2,058. If the April 22, 2025 low of $1,537 fails as support, the next level sits at the April 9, 2025 low of $1,385.

ETF Outflows and Glamsterdam

U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs logged 17 consecutive days of net outflows through May, totaling approximately $401 million, per SoSoValue, a crypto market data provider. That streak was longer than any comparable outflow pattern recorded for Bitcoin ETF products, per SoSoValue, suggesting the institutional rotation out of ETH wasn’t a generic crypto-market response to macro headwinds. Polymarket prices a 76% probability that ETH reaches $1,500 before year-end; Kalshi sits at 73%.

The Glamsterdam protocol upgrade, which targets Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) and Block-Level Access Lists to enable parallel transaction execution on Ethereum’s layer-1 network, slipped to Q3 2026 after originally targeting June. A 200-million-gas limit floor for the post-upgrade network was confirmed at the Soldøgn Interop in April 2026, representing a 233% increase from the current limit. The delay pushes the nearest major Ethereum network development back by at least a quarter.

The Rebound’s Architecture

CoinGlass data showed $665 million in liquidations over the 24 hours through Monday, with $528 million coming from short positions. When a market falls sharply enough to build concentrated short exposure, any partial recovery forces those shorts to close at a loss, adding upward price momentum that mirrors fresh buying. Sunday’s session fits that pattern: each of the three coins covered here made a daily high and stalled before Monday’s open.

June 5 was a different session altogether. That day recorded $1.7 billion in liquidations, predominantly long-side forced selling as BTC dropped below $60,000. According to Jean-David Péquignot, chief commercial officer at Deribit, a major crypto derivatives exchange, more than $1.2 billion in notional open interest sat in put options at that strike. A sustained break below $60,000 would have forced market makers to sell spot BTC or futures to hedge their exposure, compounding the cascade. The process stabilized above $59,000, but it consumed most of the available buying pressure. Sunday’s altcoin recovery built on a narrower foundation than the bounce size suggests.

The Federal Reserve meets June 16-17. Polymarket prices a 52% probability of a year-end rate hike, a number that was a fraction of that before Friday’s jobs print landed.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any digital asset. Cryptocurrency markets carry significant price risk, and past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should conduct their own research and consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decision. Figures cited were accurate as of publication on June 8, 2026.