Ethereum and Solana prices collapsed Monday morning as President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs sparked a global market selloff and pushed crypto liquidations past $1.4 billion.
At press time the Ethereum price has shed 16.4%, dribbling down to $1,485 after briefly touching its lowest price since October 2023 during Asian trading hours.
Meanwhile, the Solana price has plummeted 15.4% on the day, dipping as low as $96.70, before gaining ground to $101 at the time of writing.
The broad-based crypto market sell-off intensified in lockstep with futures markets, with S&P 500 contracts plunging 5.98% and Nasdaq futures dropping 6.2% by Sunday night, over a whirlwind weekend that saw equities markets responding with “circuit breaker” measures.
Fears of a global trade war deepened following Trump’s “Liberation Day” pronouncements of a universal 10% tariff on nearly all imports, with targeted penalties reaching 34% for China and 20% for European Union goods.
Crypto markets “reeled from a sharp pullback” as Trump’s reciprocal tariffs sent countries “scrambling to renegotiate trade terms,” Vincent Liu, chief investment officer at Kronos Research, told Decrypt.
“The uncertainty dragged Solana (SOL) and Ethereum (ETH) into a steep downtrend,” Liu explained, adding that the price skid “smells of profit-taking, as traders offload risk in the face of mounting macro tensions.”
All these factors have been “amplifying global economic jitters and weighing heavily on sentiment across the altcoin space,” Liu noted.
Over at Myriad Markets, an on-chain predictions platform launched by Decrypt parent company DASTAN, over 61% of punters see a U.S. recession within the year. (Disclosure: Myriad is a prediction market and engagement platform developed by Dastan, parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Trump’s moves “demand Federal Reserve interest rate cuts” to address the challenges ahead, Ryan Yoon, senior research analyst at Tiger Research, told Decrypt.
As key inflation indicators such as the CPI and PPI get released, the Federal Reserve would likely “find it difficult to implement rate cuts in the near future,” Yoon said. That prospect “suggests limited potential for short-term market improvement,” he explained.
Yoon points to a critical juncture over how tariff conflicts have expanded from previous points of tension.
“While previous tariff conflicts primarily involved the US and China, the current situation has expanded to affect global markets more broadly,” Yoon noted. Such a predicament “necessitates close attention to negotiations and outcomes” over a longer period.
But for the meantime, crypto market sentiment has deteriorated and fast, with the broader class of investors surveyed by the American Association of Individual Investors showing “unusually low” bullish sentiment as bearish sentiments run to 61.9%—the third highest reading on record.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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