Bitcoin zips higher to nearly $64,000 as chip rally and yen strength drive gains

Bitcoin’s best session of the week came out of Seoul and Tokyo.

The largest cryptocurrency rose 3.5% to nearly $64,000 on Friday, recovering the ground it lost when President Trump warned that strikes on Iran could intensify. It traded as low as about $61,850 before buyers returned, and roughly $28 billion changed hands over 24 hours. Bitcoin is up 4.2% on the week, CoinDesk data shows.

Ether rose 2.6% to $1,760 and is up 4% on the week. Solana added 2.6% to $78 while still carrying a 2.1% weekly loss, the only major that has not clawed back to green. XRP gained 2.2%, TRON climbed 1.2% and leads the majors at 4.7% over seven days, hyperliquid’s HYPE added 1.8% to $68, and dogecoin rose 2.6% while remaining 0.8% underwater on the week.

Leverage explains the speed of the round trip. Traders cut positions on the Trump headline and reloaded within hours, a move too fast for real demand to have driven it.

“Once liquidations begin to drive price action, the market can move faster than real demand would justify,” said Shawn Young, chief analyst at MEXC Research, who is watching how bitcoin trades inside the $60,000 to $63,000 band now that the first recovery is in.

MSCI’s Asia Pacific equities gauge climbed 1.4% as investors moved back into semiconductor shares on renewed optimism over AI demand, cutting the week’s loss to under 1%.

South Korea’s Kospi, a bellwether for AI investment, jumped 4%. SK Hynix was among the winners after pricing $26.5 billion of American depositary shares, one of the largest share sales of the year.

Gains were further extended as yen strengthened 0.6% and long-dated Japanese government bond yields fell after Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said the government wants pension funds to increase their holdings of domestic assets. Bloomberg’s dollar gauge declined and is heading for a second consecutive weekly drop.

Nothing crypto-native moved bitcoin this week. There was no ETF flow of any size, no protocol event and no exchange failure. Bitcoin absorbed an oil shock, a global bond selloff, a hawkish repricing of Fed expectations and two rounds of U.S. strikes on Iran, and finished up 4.2% because Korean memory chips are in demand and the dollar is losing ground.