President Donald Trump’s threat to impose additional 100% tariffs on imports from China sparked a sell-off in cryptocurrencies late Friday, revealing risky leverage in the space.
Digital currencies Bitcoin, Ether and Solana were among the worst-hit cryptocurrencies, bringing total liquidations to $18.28 billion as of 3:47 p.m. ET, according to the data analytics platform. CoinGlass. Cryptocurrency losses come amid massive sell-offs, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 seeing their biggest declines in six months on Friday.
That could signal a trend whereby cryptocurrencies initially recover better or prove more resilient than stocks, said Jerry Comizio, associate director of the business law program at American University’s Washington College of Law and a consultant at Digital Asset Advisors, a division of Falcon Capital Advisors.
“This definitely changes the perception from a few years ago, when there was a smaller global float, that crypto was going against the market (stock),” he added.
In the past 24 hours, about $5 billion worth of bitcoin was liquidated, along with about $4 billion worth of ether and about $2 billion worth of solana, according to CoinGlass.
This is the “largest liquidation event in crypto history,” CoinGlass said in a statement. post on.
Bitcoin is down nearly 10% over the past five days and was trading at $111,616.20 as of 3:45 p.m. ET, a jump from its fall to $103,000 as of 5:15 p.m. ET on Friday.
On Friday, ether was priced at $4,365.63, then fell to $3,742.88, a decline of 14.2%.
Solana was priced at $223.10 on Friday and fell to $178.72 as of 3:45 p.m. ET, a drop of almost 20%.
Crypto has made major strides since Trump took office this year, thanks in large part to the president’s turnaround from dismissing bitcoin as “based on nothing” and catering to crypto fans at conventions, launching his own coin and promising a strategic crypto reserve.
And Trump recently issued a decree allowing digital assets like crypto to be included in 401(k) plans, which sent bitcoin to a record high of $124,000 last week.
Despite ongoing trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing, trade tensions intensified on Thursday after China tightened export restrictions on key rare earth minerals.
Friday’s cryptocurrency plunge could be a “rocket” or “wake-up call,” Comizio said, because it could signal that “cryptocurrency market declines are going to have much more interactive impacts on the general economy in the future.”
