Investors globally are still trying to process what happened on Jan. 29.
The Thursday sell-off, triggered by a cocktail of reasons, has pushed market sentiments and prices to new lows.
Crypto greed and fear index is back to 16 (Extreme Fear) after briefly managing to come up to 26 (Fear) just earlier this week.
Amid the panic, Binance has stepped up to address the future market volatilities with a new floor plan of sorts for Bitcoin (BTC).
Related: Analyst who predicted 2021 crash warns of ‘ragingly bearish’ market
First, let’s try to dig into what happened on Jan. 29, especially with King Crypto.
Bitcoin first slipped, then began crashing violently, dragging down all its peers with it. On the other side of the market, safe-haven metals gold and silver, and S&P futures were getting hammered.
At press time, Bitcoin had dropped to $82,759, down 5.7% in 24 hours. It is barely holding above its November low near $81,000. A break below that could expose the next support zone around $75,000, last seen in April 2025.
Other cryptocurrencies were in red as well. XRP and Ethereum (ETH) both were down by 6.4%, trading at $1.75 and $2,737.07, respectively. Solana had dropped by 5.5% in the same time frame to trade hands at $115.89.
According to CoinGlass data, 277,184 traders were liquidated overnight, with the total liquidations coming up at $1.80 billion. Overall crypto market cap dropped by 5.2% to $2.9 trillion.
But the crash didn’t happen suddenly. The market was bubbling like a silent volcano all along.
Right before the crash, we were seeing precious metals like gold and silver hitting historic highs. While some analysts expected that the market rotation would lead to crypto recovering from the Oct. 10 aftermath, others were hesitant to assess.
Meanwhile, crypto is increasingly getting affected by geopolitical scenarios.
Until last week, Donald Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland by any means and the repeated tariff threats to European allies and then to neighbour Canada did not help crypto’s case. Added to that is the Iran crisis. The fears of the U.S. striking and Tehran retaliating have heightened investor worries globally.
Not to mention the President’s fiasco with Jerome Powell.
Reports that Trump plans to replace Fed Chair Powell with former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh added fuel to the fire.
At press time, Warsh had officially been announced as the new Federal Reserve Chair via a post on Truth Social.