Crypto Loses $500B, Gold & Silver Wipe Out $10T in Days

The cryptocurrency market correction accelerated into a full-blown sell-off over the past week. Bitcoin, which had challenged the $90,000 level just days ago ahead of the Federal Reserve’s first FOMC meeting of the year, failed to hold that resistance. Influenced by the Fed’s decision to pause interest rate cuts and growing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, the asset began a precipitous decline. From a Wednesday peak, Bitcoin plummeted to $81,000, saw a slight rebound to $84,000 on Friday, and then crashed below $76,000 on Saturday. The bleeding continued into Monday morning, with Bitcoin hitting a fresh multi-month low of $74,400 on the Bitstamp exchange.

This represented a loss of over $15,000 in less than a week, with nearly $10,000 of that wiped out in a brutal 36-hour period. Naturally, altcoins like Ethereum, which slumped beneath $2,200, followed suit, often amplifying Bitcoin’s losses. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization shed approximately $300 billion since Saturday and a staggering $500 billion since Wednesday’s peak. The violent price action wreaked havoc on over-leveraged traders, with more than $2.5 billion in positions liquidated over the weekend and an additional $800 million, predominantly from long bets, wiped out in the past 24 hours alone.

While Bitcoin is often criticized for its volatility, the current market environment reveals extreme turbulence across all financial fields. Even the oldest and most revered safe-haven assets have behaved irrationally. Gold, the largest non-real estate asset for decades, had recently tapped a record high near $5,600. It was joined by silver, which skyrocketed to fresh peaks above $121 in a matter of weeks. However, on Friday, something broke in the precious metals market.

Silver crashed from over $121 to $72 on Friday and slid further to $70.5. Gold simultaneously dropped from its $5,600 peak to $4,400. This historic collapse erased a combined $10 trillion from their market capitalizations in just a couple of days, as highlighted by market commentators like The Kobeissi Letter. The scale of this loss in traditional assets, often held for stability, underscores the highly atypical nature of the current macroeconomic and geopolitical climate.

From a cryptocurrency perspective, the parallel collapses provide crucial context. The $10 trillion—with a ‘T’—wiped from gold and silver is more than three times the size of the entire cryptocurrency market at its recent peak. Even after its historic crash, the market capitalization of silver alone still exceeds the combined market caps of Bitcoin and all altcoins. Gold’s market cap remains over ten times larger than that of the entire crypto sector.

This dramatic comparison lends weight to the “we are still early” narrative often cited by crypto advocates. The sheer magnitude of the traditional asset sell-off, measured in trillions, frames the crypto market’s $500 billion loss—while severe—within a different scale. It highlights cryptocurrency’s relative infancy and smaller total addressable market compared to established asset classes like gold and silver, suggesting significant room for growth and maturation as it evolves within the global financial system.