Digital assets extended their pullback Monday, moving in near lockstep with deepening losses in the software sector as a widely followed industry ETF slid to a fresh 52-week low.

Bitcoin mounted a brief recovery after a sharp overnight selloff, but the bounce quickly unraveled during U.S. morning trading as broader risk markets turned decisively lower. By midday on the East Coast, bitcoin was changing hands around $65,400, still sharply down over the past 24 hours following heavy liquidation.

The weakness tracked a broader retreat in equities. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100 each declined more than 1%, pressured by renewed selling in software companies and alternative asset managers.

The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF fell another 5% to a new one-year low and is now down roughly 35% since October. Investor anxiety has centered on whether generative AI tools could disrupt established software business models. In recent weeks, traders have increasingly treated crypto as part of the same ecosystem, with bitcoin’s price action closely mirroring moves in IGV.

At the same time, concerns are mounting that the AI-driven investment boom may be fostering financial imbalances, raising the specter of a broader credit dislocation reminiscent of 2008. Those worries have been reflected in battered private equity stocks, many of which maintain sizable exposure to software assets.

Blue Owl Capital — which recently moved to offload assets to meet investor redemption requests — slipped another 3.5% Monday and is now down roughly 32% year to date. Peers including Blackstone, Ares Management, and Apollo Global Management added to recent declines, falling between 6% and 8%.

Crypto often functions as a high-beta proxy for technology shares and overall liquidity conditions, and Monday’s price action reinforced that dynamic. While bitcoin has managed to stay above its early February lows, it remains range-bound between $60,000 and $70,000 as investor confidence in risk assets remains fragile.

Compounding the cautious tone is lingering uncertainty around global trade policy after the Supreme Court of the United States curtailed President Donald Trump’s prior use of sweeping tariffs, according to Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX Group.

The ruling helped trigger a broader risk-off mood, prompting investors to trim exposure to speculative assets. In this environment, bitcoin has behaved less like a defensive store of value and more like a leveraged play on shifts in overall market sentiment.