Is BTC fighting back against the “tariff stick”?

Source: Blockworks; Compiled by: Baishui, Golden Finance

When Trump said "tariff" was the most beautiful word in the dictionary, he overlooked that beauty is subjective.

Since Trump announced the "reciprocal" tariffs on April 2, the S&P 500 has fallen by about 10.6%.

Even gold, which is generally considered uncorrelated with stocks, fell by about 6.4% on the tariff news.

To everyone’s surprise, the cryptocurrency market held up over the weekend.

Many theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon.

Some believe that crypto assets are showing resistance amid expected rate cuts and quantitative easing; some say that Friday’s stock market sell-off was simply institutional outflows; while Galaxy’s Alex Thorn believes that BTC is simply “tariff-resistant.”

However, after briefly considering that crypto assets would decouple from the stock market, it turned out to be just an illusion.

As the weekend came to an end, Bitcoin plunged 6% by midday on Sunday, from $825,000 to its current trading level of $772,000. During the same period, ETH fell even more, by 15.7%.

Thomas Erdösi, head of product at CF Benchmarks, said prices were down, but not panic yet. He noted that "the CME basis remains firm above 6% and the need for downside protection, as seen on the 25 delta slope, highlights cautious sentiment but does not signal panic."

Total cryptocurrency market capitalization has evaporated by about $0.23 trillion, or 8.6%, so far.

Based on Bitcoin’s current price of $77,000, this is down about 27.2% from January’s all-time high of $106,000, but the decline is still relatively small compared to the past few years. The pink part of the Glassnode chart shows yesterday’s decline relative to the previous cycle.

According to CoinGlass data, the total liquidation of crypto assets in the past 24 hours is estimated to be approximately US$1.42 billion. BTC liquidations are approximately US$479 million, while ETH liquidations are US$418 million.

According to Blockanalitica, Aave v3 on Ethereum liquidated a total of $91.85 million from April 6 to 7, with zero accumulated bad debts.

If you don’t look for opportunities during a downturn, it’s not cryptocurrency.

According to the four-hour chart of the CoinGlass Relative Strength Index (RSI) heat map, well-known tokens with a market capitalization of $400 million to $500 million are showing relative strength, including AI memecoin FART (RSI: 51), DePIN token GRASS (RSI: 54), and DeFi token PENDLE (RSI: 47).

All three tokens are trading in a neutral RSI range, outperforming the broader market that is leaning toward oversold conditions. This could indicate bullish upside momentum as these tokens are not experiencing the same downward pressure seen elsewhere.