Saturday has gone from bad to worse for crypto as U.S. President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on China on Friday, sending prices reeling lower in a brutal flash crash.
Bitcoin tumbled below $112,000, and was recently trading for $111,599 — down 6.1% on the day, according to CoinGecko. But other crypto majors witnessed sharper drops, with Ethereum, the industry’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, down 7.1% to $3,821.
Ripple’s XRP and Solana (SOL) dipped 9.4% and 13.6%, respectively. Other major cryptocurrencies were battered harder, with Dogecoin dropping by 18.1%. The original meme coin and tenth-largest crypto asset was trading close to $0.1933.
The latest flare-up in the trade war debacle between the U.S. and China transpired as Trump threatened to increase tariffs on Chinese goods in response to China’s export restrictions on rare earth metals. After traditional markets closed for the week, he announced in a Truth Social post late Friday that he would impose an additional 100% tariff starting from November 1.
“Also on November 1, we will impose export controls on any and all critical software,” he postulated.
The global crypto market capitalization currently stands at $3.84 trillion as of publication time, representing a 6.7% decrease over the last 24 hours.
$19B Liquidation Shock
Amid the bloodbath, a record tally of crypto positions were wiped out across the market, triggering a giant liquidation cascade over the last 24 hours — an extent never seen in crypto market history. Data from Coinglass indicates that 24-hour liquidations reached nearly $19 billion, with the vast majority of them being leveraged bullish bets.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Covid crash: $1.2 Billion in liquidations<br><br>FTX crash: $1.6 Billion in liquidations<br><br>Today: $19.16 Billion in liquidations<br><br>This is Biggest liquidation event in history of crypto and almost 20x bigger than the Covid crash of March 2020. <a href=”https://t.co/avCSRK3l53″>pic.twitter.com/avCSRK3l53</a></p>— Ash Crypto (@Ashcryptoreal) <a href=”https://twitter.com/Ashcryptoreal/status/1976802618833080365?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 11, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
CoinGlass noted in a post on X that while it reported $19.13 billion in liquidations, “the actual total is likely much higher,” explaining that Binance — the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume — does not report as quickly as other platforms.
