After a long winter that the cryptocurrency market endured and only recently seemed to be coming out fighting, it seems poised for another dramatic turn of events. Trillions of dollars in value are being wiped out in cryptos in a matter of only weeks, reversing much of the hard-won gains that had revived investor sentiment earlier this year. Bitcoin, which lit all eyes up in its recent run-up to a record-breaking $126,000 and had reignited hopes of a sustained bull run, has retreated back towards $90,000, dragging the wider market down with it and triggering one of the steepest sell-offs the digital-asset world has seen in years.
What happened to crypto market sentiment? Over the past six weeks, the global cryptocurrency market has plunged roughly a quarter of its value, wiping out about $1.2 trillion from the top-line market capitalisation of all digital assets.
The total market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies came down from about $4.4 trillion in early October to just over $3.15 trillion by mid-November. Bitcoin fell from a peak above $126,000 in early October to trade almost at $90,000 in mid-November, a decline of roughly 25–30 per cent from that peak. The slump erased almost all of crypto’s gains for 2025 and pushed many other tokens far deeper into losses.
And it is not just Bitcoin that is bearing the brunt of the wipeout. Ethereum (ETH) has also taken a huge hit, with reports from November showing it plunging as much as 12 per cent in a single session to around $3,166 and trading around $3,000 on Wednesday. Over the past month, Ether has lost nearly 21 per cent of its value. Meanwhile, Solana (SOL) has also been among the worst affected. The cryptocurrency was trading down 26 per cent at $139 from a high of $200 just a couple of weeks ago, increasing the pain for leveraged long positions and rattling confidence in riskier sectors of the crypto market.
And behind the start of the fall of the crypto dominoes lies October 10, when a sudden announcement by US President Donald Trump of 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports triggered what many market experts are now calling the defining moment of the crypto meltdown. Within hours of his announcement, more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated. Subsequently, investors started pulling large sums from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with one reported single-day outflow of about $870 million in mid-November, according to a Reuters report. Why did the crypto market crash so sharply? Market participants widely pointed to fading expectations that the US Federal Reserve would cut interest rates soon. Experts cited by Reuters stated that usually when rate-cut bets begin to evaporate, investors tend to move away from high-volatility assets such as cryptocurrencies and move towards safer instruments. That broader risk aversion coincided with weakness in high-growth tech stocks, amplifying outflows from speculative corners of the market.
