New Delhi, July 3 -- NEW YORK - Kevin Warsh said Wednesday that inflation risks had softened - the first time the Federal Reserve chair had made that concession since June. Bitcoin crossed $61,000 within the hour.

The price hit $61,442, up roughly 4 percent from a weekly low of $58,200, as South Korea's Kospi index fell 7.9 percent and Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together shed an estimated $290 billion in combined market value. Technology sold. Bitcoin did not.

That divergence is the sharpest single-session signal crypto markets have produced in months. For two years, Bitcoin had tracked the Nasdaq closely enough that analysts had largely stopped treating it as a separate asset class. Wednesday broke that pattern at exactly the mom...