Bitcoin fell below $76,000 during Thursday's US trading session as a sharp sell-off in technology shares spread into crypto, wiping out the post-election rebound that had briefly taken the token back above $80,000.

A sharp fall, then a partial recovery

The largest cryptocurrency dropped more than 5.3% over 24 hours and touched an intraday low of $75,568 on Thursday before recovering to trade around $76,000 on Friday, according to CoinDesk. The wider CoinDesk 20 index, a broad measure of the digital-asset market, fell 6.28% over the same period. Ether dropped about 7%.

ETF investors pull money out

US-listed spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds saw $430.2 million in net outflows on Thursday, according to SoSoValue data cited by CoinDesk. Fidelity's FBTC led the exits with $199.9 million out, followed by BlackRock's IBIT with $105 million. The withdrawals reversed Wednesday's $74.6 million inflow and took net redemptions for the week through Thursday to $869.8 million. Ether funds lost $99.9 million on the day.

Forced selling deepens the drop

Leveraged traders took the worst of the slide. About $1.26 billion in leveraged cryptocurrency positions were liquidated over 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data, of which $1.12 billion were long positions — bets that prices would rise. Analysts linked the sell-off to concerns that the Democrats' midterm sweep of Congress could slow spending on artificial intelligence data centres, after the Nasdaq fell 5.5% and the S&P 500 dropped 4.3% on Thursday. One broker said the stock-market rout was spilling into crypto as asset managers sold alternative holdings to meet margin calls and cut borrowing.