Bitcoin dropped 6% to $75,700 on Thursday, giving back the gains it had built up since the U.S. election. Ether slid 7% over the same stretch. The trigger wasn't anything crypto-native — it was a selloff on the Nasdaq that spilled straight into digital assets and forced $1.03 billion in crypto liquidations.
The move erased what had been a clean post-election run for bitcoin and served as a blunt reminder that crypto still trades like a high-beta risk asset when equities sneeze.
The Nasdaq connection
Crypto didn't sell off on its own news. The Nasdaq did the damage first, and bitcoin followed. That ordering matters. For all the talk about bitcoin as an uncorrelated asset or a hedge, Thursday's session looked like the old pattern: when tech stocks drop, leveraged crypto positions get flushed out alongside them.
The $1.03 billion in liquidations is the tell. That's not discretionary selling — that's forced exits, the kind that accelerate a move once margin calls start cascading. Longs that had been stacked up during the post-election rally got taken out in a hurry.
Ether takes a harder hit
Ether's 7% decline outpaced bitcoin's 6%, which fits the usual risk-off script. When traders de-risk, they tend to dump the higher-volatility names first, and ETH has consistently played that role this cycle.
There's no separate ether-specific catalyst in the mix here. The move tracks the broader drawdown, just with more amplitude.
What the selloff exposes
The episode puts a spotlight back on a structural feature of this market that tends to get ignored during rallies: crypto's vulnerability to broader market trends and the degree to which financial markets are now wired together. Bitcoin's post-election gains were built on a risk-on backdrop. When that backdrop cracked, the gains didn't hold.
That interconnectedness cuts both ways. It's part of why crypto rallied so hard after the election, and it's why a bad day on the Nasdaq can vaporize a chunk of those gains in a single session. Traders who treated the post-election move as crypto-specific momentum just got a costly reminder that it wasn't.
Where the market sits now
Bitcoin is back at $75,700, a level that puts the post-election advance in the rearview. The immediate question is whether the Nasdaq selloff was a one-day event or the start of something with more legs. Crypto's next move probably depends more on that answer than on anything happening inside the industry itself.
For now, the liquidation cascade has run its course. Whether the leverage that fueled it gets rebuilt — and how quickly — will show up in the next few sessions. If equities stabilize, the dip-buyers may show up. If they don't, Thursday's flush may not be the last one this week.
