Bitcoin rebounds after dreadful day that saw $1.26 billion in liquidations

CoinMarketCap’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index is at an all-time low of 5, representing “extreme fear.”

The bloodbath bitcoin’s been suffering seems to have been staunched, at least as of Friday morning, following the asset dropping to the $63,000 level on Thursday, it’s lowest price since October 2024. Bitcoin has climbed back above $68,000, but that’s still a 46% drop from its October 6 all-time high. This also marks bitcoin’s largest two-week drawdown since June 2022, according to K33 Research.

Reflecting the market panic, CoinMarketCap’s Fear and Greed Index hit an all-time low of 5, reflecting “extreme fear.”

Meanwhile, crypto liquidations reached $2.42 billion in the past 24 hours, CoinGlass data shows. Bitcoin suffered $1.26 billion in liquidations, with the bulk of them — $984.25 million — in long positions.

Bitunix analyst Dean Chen told Sherwood News that at this stage, the crypto market functions largely as a reflection of overall risk sentiment.

“Bitcoin has retraced toward its weekly demand zone, trading around the $66,000 level. Key structural support lies in the $62,000–$60,000 range, while a recovery above $71,000–$73,000 would be needed to signal an improvement in risk absorption,” Chen said. “Until political uncertainty is further digested, price action is likely to remain dominated by consolidation and post-deleveraging rebalancing rather than a renewed directional trend.”

Bitcoin ETFs continue to be in the red, with $434 million in outflows on Thursday. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, which was close to $100 billion in assets under management in October, is now down to $48.68 billion, SoSoValue data shows.

John Glover, CIO of Ledn, told Sherwood that bitcoin’s current retreat also calls into question whether we see highs above $100,000 at all in 2026.

“There is something structural in the market that is causing weakness, but one thing is clear: the bears are attacking the bulls,” he said.

Longer-term, Josh Olszewicz, VP head of trading at Canary Capital, also told Sherwood that the dearth of any bullish catalysts at the moment and the macro backdrop remaining unsupportive for crypto assets leads him to expect the bear market to likely last until Q4 of this year, “with BTC price eventually stabilizing in the $50-$60k region around the 200-week moving average,” he said.

Sage D. Young4h

XRP bouncing back faster than its peers after crypto market downturn

XRP is seeing the strongest relief bounce on Friday among its peers following the broad market downturn in crypto.

XRP hit its lowest mark since 2024 on Thursday, but the price of the cryptocurrency has increased roughly 20% in the last 24 hours, outpacing bitcoin and ethereum, which have seen 6.5% and 5.2% gains, respectively. dogecoin has climbed 8% and solana is up 5% in the same period, data from CoinGecko shows.

XRP’s “price tends to amplify market movements,” Kaiko research analyst Thomas Probst told Sherwood News. “Markets are experiencing a phase of liquidity contraction with increasing volatility. Therefore, rebounds can be frequent, even if they are rarely sustained over the long term.”

The relief comes amid increased activity on the XRP Ledger. Crypto analytics firm Santiment flagged that, during the dip, XRP Ledger saw a four-month high of “whale transactions” over $100,000 and a six-month high of unique addresses on the network in one eight-hour candle. “These are both major signals of a price reversal for any asset,” the firm said.

Ripple, the company closely tied to XRP and its largest holder, said in a Thursday blog post that XRP is “at the heart of every institutional use case,” such as stablecoin payments, tokenized collateral, and lending markets.

In an updated road map for the XRP Ledger, the firm outlined upcoming features that act as a “building block for composable financial ecosystems.” These features include a lending protocol, confidential transfers using zero-knowledge proofs, and a new layer of programmability to escrow primitives.

Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs absorbed $5.9 million worth of inflows on Thursday, helping the week remain in the black at nearly $24 million.

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Altcoins from solana to dogecoin sink to levels not seen in years

As bitcoin continues to set new cycle lows, altcoins are revisiting levels not seen in several years. Over the past 24 hours:

XRP has dropped nearly 19% to trade at $1.24, its lowest mark since November 2024;
Solana is down 7% to trade under $84, returning to a price point last recorded in January 2024;
dogecoin has slid 10% to $0.09, a price last seen in September 2024;
chainlink is down below $8.40, erasing all gains made since October 2023.

It’s hitting the crypto ecosystem hard: 305,791 traders have been liquidated in the past 24 hours, with total liquidations standing at $1.46 billion, CoinGlass data shows. The market capitalization of the entire crypto space is now at $2.35 trillion, a drawdown of 7.5% in the last 24 hours and a stunning 46.6% plunge from the all-time high of $4.4 trillion set in October 2025.

The altcoin market is correlated with bitcoin, with both undergoing a steep decline, according to Devin Ryan, director of financial technology research at investment bank Citizens Capital Markets & Advisory.

As to what is driving the downswing, Ryan pointed to the October sell-off that triggered the massive initial wave of liquidations as well as a number of macro headwinds, such as ongoing geopolitical conflicts, concerns of another government shutdown, and uncertainty surrounding a new Fed chair.

There’s volatility in the asset class because of market structure issues and concerns around where bitcoin goes from here from a price perspective, Ryan said.

Ryan expects the correlation between bitcoin and the rest of the crypto ecosystem to break down over the next year to two years.

The recent volatility highlights that cryptocurrency’s blockchain technology is still in an early phase, Ryan said. “We are still in the early days of even getting the clarity around regulation and the legislation that’s needed to progress from this world of pilot phase — what might happen on the blockchain to here’s what’s happening on the blockchain and on which blockchains,” Ryan told Sherwood News.