Cryptocurrency Tuesday went from bad to worse as a massive sell-off unfolds across the technology and financial sector.
Bitcoin fell 5% to $75,000 by early afternoon in the United States, just a few hundred dollars above its low last weekend. Ethereum Ether fell 6.5% to near $2,200, while Solana fell below $100, down 5.5%.
Shopify (SHOP), Adobe (ADBE), Salesforce (CRM), Intuit (INTU) are just a few of the larger names that fell 7-12% during the session. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) is down 5% today. The thematic fund has now lost 14% in just one week and is down almost 28% since its October high.
Private equity stocks are also down sharply today, with giants like Blackstone (BX), Ares Capital (ARES), KKR (KKR), and Apollo (APO) all posting losses of 6-10%.
The sector has fallen on hard times in recent months, with the downturn accelerating after a filing late Friday (January 23) from a BlackRock private debt fund – BlackRock TCP Capital (TCPC) – announcing plans to reduce the net value of its assets by 19%.
The news suggested that perhaps all is not as well in the economy as the headlines might suggest, and that liquidity in the system may be tighter than previously thought.
Bitcoin certainly wasn’t in a bull market at the time of filing, but it wasn’t in panic mode either, having reached around $91,000 earlier in the day. But since then, it’s pretty normal.
Stocks related to digital assets reflect the trend. Galaxy (GLXY) led the losses with an 18% decline following its earnings, while Strategy (MSTR), Coinbase (COIN), Circle (CRCL), Bullish (BLSH) fell 5-7% during the session.
Crypto winter, but there is good news
Matt Hougan, CIO of digital asset management company Bitwise, argued that the crypto market has been going through a large-scale winter since January 2025, similar to past bear markets like in 2018 and 2022.
“This is not a ‘bull market correction’ or ‘bearish,’ he said in a Monday note. “This is a full-fledged, 2022-style, Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-The-Revenant-style crypto winter.”
On a more positive note, this prolonged bear market may be coming to an end, Hougan said. Slowdowns, he noted, typically last about 13 months. If, as Hougan did, you place the start of the bear market in January 2025, rather than October 2025, crypto is weeks away from a possible bottom.
“As a veteran of several crypto winters, I can tell you that the end of those crypto winters looked a lot like today: despair, hopelessness, and malaise,” he wrote.
