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Back when the US was headed for a brutal economic contraction that never really came, bears would point out that bitcoin had never truly been through a recession.

That’s probably still true, considering the pandemic recession was mostly a blip. But bitcoin has actually been through a major trade war — the one Trump waged with China during his first term.

It may have coincided with a rough bear market that ran for more than a year, but let’s not get superstitious.

Meanwhile:

• TRUMP is down to $3.54 billion market cap after losing 35% in the past week, the worst performing top-100 coin alongside VIRTUALS and WLD.

• Weekly DEX volumes have fallen 31% week on week, with Solana’s Raydium dropping by 48%.

• Monthly users of social trading app Vector.fun grew from 33,000 in December to 130,000 in January, per Blockworks Research data.

⚖️ Matters of scale

We’re totally doomed.

Doomed to forever suffer the psychology of big numbers — the more bitcoin goes up by raw dollar value, the further it falls when it corrects. Which can look much scarier than it really is.

Bitcoin has shed as much as $18,000 since its all-time high on January 20, set hours before Trump’s second inauguration — a 16.5% drop in two weeks — sending the rest of crypto spiraling as it always does.

The hopium is that this isn’t even the worst correction of 2025 so far. What is currently a 12% retracement in the past week at worst is still better than the 13% lost in the second week of January. 

Bitcoin also in a week fell from nearly $108,300 to under $92,500 in the middle of December — nearly 15%.

You can see it on the chart above. The blue columns show bitcoin’s weekly price performance on a rolling basis, and the orange line points to the total size of bitcoin’s current pullback as of this morning. 

Drawdowns like these happen regularly. The real trick is knowing when bitcoin won’t bounce back, putting an end to the bull market.

More hopium: Historically, the ends of bull markets have been marked by much larger short-term corrections ranging around 20% to over 40%.

Still, as far as performance during the US election is concerned, bitcoin is holding up. It’s so far tracking how it did as Trump prepared to take office the first time, in 2017. 

Bitcoin, starting 30 days before election day until today, has gained about 53%. It had otherwise rallied 66% by around this time following Trump’s 2016 win. 

Both are well below the returns bitcoin posted around Biden 2020, although that was during the pandemic helicopter money era so it’s not really a fair comparison.

Everything that isn’t bitcoin is where it hurts most. ETH has slipped as much as 34% in the past week — from over $3,200 to $2,124 earlier this morning before climbing back to nearly $2,600. That’s good for a 20% bounce.

Practically all other altcoins are undergoing something similar. Many are seeing their worst corrections since August, which was a tough month for both crypto and the stock market after Powell signaled rate cuts were coming.

All that was quickly shrugged off and here we are, five months later and about 75% higher. 

Just don’t tell that to the nearly $1.9 billion in leveraged longs that have been reported wiped in the past 24 hours, the most since December. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou reckons the total number could be as high as $10 billion.

— David

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• Maybe it’s not so bad after all. Or, at least, that seems to be the tone shift out of India as the government rethinks its crypto approach according to a Reuters report.

• Raydium knocked Uniswap down a peg in terms of monthly DEX volume, per The Block’s data.

• Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino plans to put the $13.7 billion in profits reported by the stablecoin firm to work in AI and a “very tall tower.”

🐟 Just keep swimming

Welcome to February, I guess. 

Remember how, on Friday, we talked about how some on Wall Street could be tuning into the crypto markets over the weekend to weigh how equities will react when they open? 

Well, we just got the perfect example. 

Bitcoin and other parts of crypto reacted to the tariff news as a “macro proxy,” according to Douglas Borthwick. 

Bitwise’s Jeff Park is bullish on the scenario playing out. For him, bitcoin’s left as the “asset to own” if the US continues down a path that could both lower yield and lower the dollar. 

Basically, we could see the perfect recipe for a bitcoin play out, according to Park. 

Recapping this weekend, though, crypto fundamentals were at play if you ask Ryan Connor, Blockworks head of research.

And that’s why we saw HYPE shake off the selling pressure. Let me tell you, I, myself, am hype about fundamentals playing a big part in this cycle (sorry not sorry). 

Does this mean we’re likely to see crypto get more and more caught up in the macro headlines? Potentially. 

I ran a poll on X at the end of last week gauging whether or not people outside of our Empire bubble think that non-crypto traders and investors could be gauging equity market reactions through crypto and it doesn’t seem like many folks are sold on it yet.

However, if we continue to see this type of reaction on the weekends — and it’s not just knee-jerk — then I think the same poll will have very different answers in six months. 

— Katherine

From macroeconomic shifts to the evolving role of crypto in global markets, Mohamed El-Erian brings decades of financial expertise to the stage. Mike Novogratz, one of the earliest institutional investors in digital assets, unpacks what’s next for the space. And Anatoly Yakovenko, the mind behind Solana, breaks down how high-performance blockchains are shaping the future of finance.

DAS NYC is where the real conversations happen — no hype, just sharp insights from the people driving digital assets forward.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

On our minds: The end of the bull market