Bitcoin’s price has crashed 6% to tremble just above the $82,000 line. Illustration: Gwen P; Source: ShutterstockBitcoin’s price has crashed 6% to tremble just above the $82,000 line. Illustration: Gwen P; Source: Shutterstock

What nuked Bitcoin? Price threatens to crash below $80,000

2026/01/31 01:37
3 min read

A version of this article appeared in our The Roundup newsletter on January 30. Sign up here.

Hey, Eric here.

Alexa, play my “Apocalypse Nowish” playlist.

Not only has the Doomsday clock been set to 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it’s ever been to Armageddon — but markets are looking pretty grim right now.

Crypto traders who held out hope for a last-minute January rally were sorely disappointed on Thursday when Bitcoin’s price crashed 6% to hoover just above the $82,000 line.

The slump wasn’t contained to digital assets either.

The dollar is down to a four-year low, and stock markets plummeted, too.

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures are down roughly 1% on Friday.

Gold and silver, which have been on a tear this week, finally tumbled by more than 4% and 5%, respectively.

So what’s behind the market mayhem?

Take your pick. Analysts are spoilt for choice when it comes to explaining the crash.

Autopsies include the hangover from the October sell-off, which saw $1 trillion wiped out from the total crypto market’s value; US President Donald Trump’s nomination of hawkish candidate Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair; tariff threats; the fatal shootings in Minneapolis; and Trump’s seemingly flippant attitude towards the crashing value of the dollar.

And then there are artificial intelligence bubble worries.

Bitcoin slid as tech stocks like Microsoft fell amid investor concerns that tech giants are overspending on AI with little to show for it.

“Regardless of the fact that many in the Bitcoin space see Bitcoin as the world’s hardest money and stack Bitcoin regardless of price, the vast majority of the market still sees Bitcoin as a tech trade,” Timot Lamarre, director of market research at Unchained, said.

And it may not be over yet.

Kraken analysts warn that Bitcoin’s price could crash below $80,000.

Even before this week’s chaos, analysts said it could fall further to $75,000 or even $10,000.

Yet, in the midst of the market pandemonium, perennial crypto bulls like Maelstrom’s Arthur Hayes, Strategy’s Michael Saylor, and Bitmine’s Tom Lee are topping up their coffers with more digital assets — betting on a better tomorrow for cyber cash.

Here’s hoping the light they’re seeing at the end of the tunnel is the dawn of a new day and not another freight train.

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Post of the Week

After silver slumped this week, crypto watchers were quick to make light of the situation.

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Pulling public figures, he finds CoinMarketCap showing roughly 59.6 billion XRP as circulating, while XRPScan reports about 64.7 billion. The divergence prompts what becomes the video’s key methodological point: different sources count “circulating” differently. Related Reading: Analyst Sounds Major XRP Warning: Last Chance To Get In As Accumulation Balloons As he explains it, the higher on-ledger number likely includes balances that aggregators exclude or treat as restricted, most notably Ripple’s programmatic escrow. He highlights that Ripple still “holds a chunk of XRP in escrow, about 35.3 billion XRP locked up across multiple wallets, with a nominal schedule of up to 1 billion released per month and unused portions commonly re-escrowed. Those coins exist and are accounted for on-ledger, but “they aren’t actually sitting on exchanges” and are not immediately available to buyers. 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That effective-float framing underpins the crux of his thesis: a potential supply shock if demand accelerates faster than fresh sell-side supply appears. “Price is a dance between supply and demand,” he says; if institutional or sovereign-scale users suddenly need XRP and “the market finds that there isn’t enough XRP readily available,” order books could thin out and prices could “shoot on up, sometimes violently.” His phrase “circulating supply could collapse overnight” is presented not as a claim that tokens are destroyed or removed from the ledger, but as a market-structure scenario in which available inventory to sell dries up quickly because holders won’t part with it. How Could The XRP Supply Shock Happen? On the demand side, he anchors the hypothetical to tokenization. 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