Why Is Bitcoin And Crypto Down Today? Key Drivers | Crypto News
Bitcoin slid to $91,920 late Sunday in New York, down 3.8% from roughly $95,500, as a sharp risk-off impulse hit crypto markets and shortly bled into high beta majors. Ether fell as a lot as 5.3% to $3,177, while XRP and Solana underperformed with drawdowns of 10.4% to $1.847 and 9% to $130, respectively, as leveraged positioning was pressured out.
Why Is Bitcoin And Crypto Down Today?
The rapid catalyst was a geopolitics-to-trade headline that landed into a weekend liquidity window: President Donald Trump said the US would impose extra 10% tariffs on imports from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland beginning Feb. 1, escalating to 25% on June 1 unless a deal is reached for the US to purchase Greenland.
European officers framed the transfer as coercive and signaled a coordinated response. Dutch Foreign Minister David van Weel called the menace “blackmail,” including: “It’s not necessary. It doesn’t help the alliance (NATO).” The focused international locations, many of them NATO allies, issued a stark pushback warning that tariff threats “undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral,” while EU representatives convened emergency talks over potential retaliation. France’s President Macron threatened EU’s “anti-coercion instrument.”
BREAKING: France’s President Macron calls for the EU to activate its “most potent trade weapon” against the US after President Trump’s tariff menace over Greenland.
Macron is now calling for the use of the EU’s “anti-coercion instrument.”
If used against the US, it will… pic.twitter.com/E47Bpe03lK
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) January 18, 2026
For Bitcoin and all the crypto market, the importance isn’t the tariff math in isolation; it’s the abrupt repricing of global growth and coverage risk. When macro merchants de-risk into headlines like this, liquid markets have a tendency to transmit the shock first and crypto, with its 24/7 construction and deep derivatives footprint, often turns into the strain valve.
On-chain and venue-level indicators instructed the promote strain was not merely offshore circulation. CryptoQuant analyst Mignolet pointed to an elevated “CPG” (Coinbase Premium Gap), a metric monitoring the price differential between Coinbase’s USD market and Binance’s USDT market that is often read as a proxy for US-led demand or provide.
“We’re seeing the strongest selling premium (CPG) in recent periods. Since the ETF market was not open at the time, this selling pressure is coming from US whales operating outside of ETFs. It’s one of the traditional selling patterns we’ve seen repeatedly in the past,” Mignolet wrote in a CryptoQuant be aware.
That framing issues because it implies the transfer wasn’t pushed by ETF creations/redemptions, so the marginal vendor was lively in spot/OTC and derivatives channels that stay open through the weekend.
Once spot price slipped through key ranges, futures mechanics did the remaining. Coinglass data confirmed 249.422 merchants had been liquidated, the entire liquidations coming in at $874.93 million over the past 24 hours. Longs accounted for $787.92 million versus $87.01 million in shorts, an uneven wipeout that usually displays crowded long publicity being force-closed into falling costs.
At press time, Bitcoin recovered to $93,000.
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