Crypto’s Tuesday has gone from bad to worse as a broader selloff in the tech and financial sectors unfolds.
Bitcoin is back 5% to $75,000 in the early US afternoon hours, just a few hundred dollars above last weekend’s low. Ethereum’s Ether is down 6.5% to near $2,200, while Solana fell below $100, down 5.5%.
Shopify (SHOP), Adobe (ADBE), Salesforce (CRM), Intuit (INTU) were just a few names of the broader tumbles 7%-12% during the session. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF ( IGV ) fell 5% today. The thematic fund has now lost 14% in just one week and is nearly 28% lower since its peak in October.
Also today, private equity stocks are down hard, with giants like Blackstone ( BX ), Ares Capital ( ARES ), KKR ( KKR ) and Apollo ( APO ) all posting losses of 6%-10%.
The sector has had a rough ride in recent months, with the slide accelerating following a filing on Friday evening (23 January) by a BlackRock private debt fund – BlackRock TCP Capital (TCPC) – which said it intended to reduce the net value of its assets by 19%.
The news suggested that all might not be as good with the economy as the headlines might suggest, and that liquidity in the system might be tighter than previously thought.
Bitcoin certainly wasn’t in a bull market at the time of the filing, but it wasn’t in panic mode either, having risen to around the $91,000 level earlier in the day. However, it has been pretty much straight down ever since.
Digital asset-related stocks reflect the slide. Galaxy (GLXY) led losses, down 18% after 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 firm Bitwise, claimed that the crypto market has been in a full-scale winter since January 2025, similar to previous bear markets such as 2018 and 2022.
“This is not a ‘bull market correction’ or ‘a plunge,'” he said in a Monday note. “It’s a 2022-like, Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-The-Revenant-style crypto winter.”
On a more positive note, the prolonged bear market may be coming to an end, Hougan said. The downturns, he noted, typically last about 13 months. If, as Hougan has, you place the beginning of the bear market in January 2025 instead of October 2025, within weeks of that crypto may be pegged.
“As a veteran of several crypto winters, I can tell you that the end of these crypto winters feels a lot like now: despair, desperation and malaise,” he wrote.
