Bitcoin took a nosedive on Friday, falling below $110,000 and wiping out a jaw-dropping $19 billion from the crypto market.
The culprit? US President Trump’s surprise announcement of a 100% tariff on Chinese imports starting November 1, plus some new rules on critical software exports.
Investors freaked out, worried a full-blown trade war was back on, and all those leveraged crypto positions started getting liquidated left and right.
And it wasn’t just Bitcoin as Ethereum, Solana, and other big altcoins got dragged down too as traders scrambled to get out of risky bets.
Bitcoin crash: Crypto meltdown follows Trump’s tariff shock
After Trump dropped the tariff bombshell, Bitcoin went into freefall.
It had been cruising above $120,000 earlier in October but slid all the way down to around $102,000 on major exchanges like Binance, its lowest point since mid-2025.
In just 24 hours, more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions got wiped out, taking down about 1.6 million traders in one of the biggest single-day liquidation events the crypto world has ever seen.
According to data from Coinglass, a whopping $16.8 billion of that came from long positions, a clear sign that overleveraged investors were completely blindsided.
Ethereum tanked over 16%, Solana slipped under $190, and some smaller tokens lost nearly half their value.
The entire crypto market shed close to $500 billion, dropping from $4.27 trillion to around $3.84 trillion as panic selling kicked in.
Social media and trading platforms lit up with chaos as automated liquidation systems kicked into overdrive, triggering even more forced sales and pushing prices down even further.
Even stablecoins weren’t spared as USDe briefly lost its dollar peg during the chaos, adding to the panic.
The whole episode was a harsh reminder of just how sensitive the crypto market still is to big macro and geopolitical shocks, especially with so much money tied up in leveraged trades.
What analysts say
According to market experts, Trump’s tariff shock was really just the spark that set off a much bigger wave of risk-off sentiment across global markets.
As per Cryptopolitan, a Blockscope Research analyst said the 100% China tariff “instantly priced in global recession fears,” pushing investors to dump risky assets, Bitcoin included.
Several analysts even compared the crash to past black swan events, calling it one of the most brutal shakeouts in recent years.
Still, not everyone’s panicking. An analyst from BitMEX pointed out that while Bitcoin’s drop was steep, its long-term fundamentals haven’t changed, and the crash had created rare buying opportunities.
EconSphere Advisors economist added another layer of concern, he warned that the new tariffs and export controls could seriously mess with global supply chains, especially in areas like semiconductors and AI.
That, he said, could put even more pressure on already fragile risk markets if the trade fight keeps escalating.
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