Ether, solana and dogecoin slide as Strategy's bitcoin sales plan pressures market

Ether (ETH), solana (SOL) and DOGE$0.07211 led a slide among major currencies on Tuesday as the Japanese yen sank to a 40-year low, lifting the U.S. dollar and keeping pressure on crypto.

Bitcoin traded around $59,514, down 0.3% over 24 hours and 7% on the week, per CoinDesk data, holding below its 200-week moving average, the average price over roughly the past four years and a long-term line it has sat on all month.

The week's losses ran deep across the altcoins. Ether fell 8.2% over seven days to about $1,587, XRP dropped 7.1% to $1.04 and dogecoin slid 11.9% to $0.072, the worst of the majors. BNB lost 6.5%. Solana bucked the trend, up 3% on the day and 2.9% on the week to $74, and Hyperliquid's HYPE bounced 7% on the day to leave it roughly flat for the week.

The immediate driver was currencies. The yen slipped past 162 per dollar, its weakest since 1986, pushing the dollar higher across the board. A stronger dollar makes dollar-priced assets like bitcoin costlier for foreign buyers and tends to draw money out of risk trades.

Onchain demand stayed soft through the slide, according to Glassnode data. The number of active addresses, a rough gauge of how many users are actually transacting, sat around 618,000, in the middle of its recent range rather than breaking higher.

The value of coins moving across the network held near $4.2 billion, just above the bottom of its range around $3.6 billion, pointing to subdued rather than surging activity, the firm said in a Monday report.

Total transaction fees, or what users pay to move funds and a read on competition for space in each block, kept contracting. Together, the three say demand has not picked up even with prices lower.

Adding to the caution, Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, said Monday it may sell more than a billion dollars of the token under a new program to shore up its finances, a reversal of founder Michael Saylor's long-standing refusal to sell.

The prospect of those sales hangs over an already thin market. That leaves crypto where it has traded for weeks, pinned by a strong dollar and a lack of fresh demand rather than any single shock.

The next tests are whether the dollar's climb stalls and whether the yen's slide forces Japan to step in, a move some warn could unwind the cheap-yen borrowing long used to fund risk trades worldwide.

For now, with onchain activity quiet and a large seller possibly waiting, crypto has little to lift it.