October is known to be the month when market crashes happen, and in 2025, it certainly lived up to it. After Bitcoin had reached a new all-time high on October 6th, it all came crashing down just a few days later.
From the all-time high of $126,300 on the 6th, it fell as low as $104,782.88 on the 11th – down 14% from the Friday high in just hours. This rapid fall wiped out billions in leveraged bets. It also caused even harder collapses of smaller altcoins like Ethereum and Dogecoin.
And what triggered it all was trade-war news. In response to China’s tightening of rare-earth exports, Trump responded with a statement that resulted in panic.
Trump’s claim was that the US would start enforcing 100% tariffs on imports from China starting November 1st. This statement immediately led to panic on the stock market, but it soon closed down for the weekend. The panic then infiltrated the crypto market, and the market crashed almost immediately.
But why did this crypto crash happen due to a trade war message?
While crypto isn’t directly connected to the USA tariffs, they are both closely connected to the global economy. At the risk of a trade war, investors saw crypto investments as crypto, causing them to sell. And then, once people started selling, others detected the drop and joined the panic sell. Once the price of Bitcoin had sunk low enough, forced automatic liquidations set in, further aggravating the meltdown. And since crypto markets are active 24/7, there was no time to pause and think. It all happened instantly, and once the butterfly effect had started, there was nothing to slow it down. The crypto market absorbed the full shock of the unrest.
In spite of Bitcoin’s reputation as digital gold, investors and traders panicked and sold in favor of safer investments, like real gold.
To make things work, many major crypto platforms couldn’t handle the load and glitches, or froze as the volumes spiked to unprecedented levels. One of the biggest exchange platforms, Bitcoin, even went completely offline at one point. Stop-loss orders failed to trigger, and the technical failures made prices diverge widely across exchanges, causing further panic and confusion.
But the panic and glitches didn’t last. After the crash, things quickly started looking up for Bitcoin again, and it’s now regaining and stabilizing.
Smaller coins likely suffered even more – and may continue to do so in the longer term. While Bitcoin quickly regained lots of value in the days after the crash, the additional doubt in the market has caused investments in altcoins to flow into Bitcoin, seen as more stable than the other crypto investments.
While many investors and even firms saw enormous losses, blockchain analysts have noticed a huge payoff for one wallet that took short positions just before the crash, gaining roughly $150 million when prices fell.
That’s one reason experts and analysts are starting to suspect that it wasn’t just panic, but perhaps market manipulation, causing the crash. It might have been an orchestrated attack, and there’s talk of lawsuits and further investigations. But due to the unregulated and anonymous nature of cryptocurrency, it could prove difficult to get to the bottom of everything.
The crash that happened this October served as a stark reminder about the vulnerability of crypto markets. While many have come to see crypto as inherently safe, although volatile, due to the unique, network-based structure it’s built on, these types of currencies are just as vulnerable to suddenly losing value as other stocks, assets, and currencies.
“The October 10 panic gave a valuable reminder of the frightening speed at which crypto markets can unravel, and a dire warning for a future scenario in which crypto is further integrated into traditional finance,” warns Molly White in her article titled Anatomy of a crypto meltdown.
It also exposed the existing gaps in oversight – it was bad enough that the crash was happening so fast, but there were also no regulators who could put things on hold while investigating possible manipulation. In other words, the crypto market may be even more vulnerable to insider trading or manipulation.
While this meltdown certainly won’t be the last crypto crash we see, we should learn from it – regulators should treat it as the important wake-up call it is and proceed cautiously and consider implementing guardrails when it comes to integrating crypto into the global economy.
At the same time, the usefulness of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mustn’t be undermined due to a crash like this. Cryptocurrencies have proved enormously useful as digital payments, and in spite of the demonstrated volatility, they benefit from built-in safety measures when it comes to hacking and transparency.
In this list, you’ll find casinos that accept payments through the Binance Coin (BNB). Thanks to the implementation of this technology, both deposits and withdrawals can be near-instant and with lower fees. Additionally, it offers a way for international payments to happen smoothly without the need for any currency conversions.
That’s just one of the many invaluable use cases for cryptocurrencies and blockchain in the real world, and we’re seeing wider implications. It’s just important that we embrace cryptocurrency with a knowledge of the risks and safety measures where possible.
