Bitcoin Market Retreat

Bitcoin saw a notable pullback, retreating to below the $100,000 mark, trading at $99,100, with a 5.7% decline over the past day, according to Block’s price page.

Similarly, the price of Ether dipped below $3,100 and is currently trading at $3,065 — an 8.2% drop on the day. The native cryptocurrency of Solana (SOL) dropped 10% to around $230.

According to Coinglass data, the market drop resulted in crypto traders liquidating over $850 million worth of crypto on exchanges over the last 24 hours, primarily affecting long positions.

This crypto selloff coincided with a notable drop in premarket trading for Nvidia shares, which fell 7%. The company, the third most valuable chipmaker globally, has a market valuation of $3.1 trillion.

This drop follows the announcement from DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, which introduced an AI model—DeepSeek R1—that reportedly rivals leading Western AI models like those from OpenAI and Meta but at a fraction of the cost and computational resources. This news contributed to a broader tech stock sell-off.

Within the crypto space, the AI agents category was among the hardest hit, declining 20% in market capitalization over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Among AI agent coins, Fartcoin led the losses with a 23% drop, followed by a 21% fall in Virtuals Protocol. Other key AI agent tokens, such as ai16z, AIXBT, and AI Rig, also saw substantial pullbacks.

The memecoin sector wasn’t spared either, witnessing an 11% fall overall. Over the past 24 hours, Pepe declined 16%, SPX6900 dropped 16%, and Dogecoin pulled back 11%. Trump’s family tokens, TRUMP and MELANIA, also experienced declines. TRUMP peaked at over $70 per token on Jan. 19 and has since dropped nearly 170% to trade at $25.5 — with a 17% drop since yesterday. Its fully diluted valuation stands at $25.5 billion.

Since early December, Bitcoin has been trading sideways around $100,000, although there have been notable fluctuations. Leading up to U.S. President Trump’s inauguration, Bitcoin reached a new all-time high, surpassing $109,000. This was primarily driven by market optimism about Trump’s pro-crypto policies. The price has since cooled and returned to around $100,000.

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, suggested a bearish outlook for Bitcoin in the short term via a post on the X platform. Hayes predicted that Bitcoin’s price could drop between $70,000 and $75,000 due to what he claims is a “mini financial crisis.” However, he also projected a dramatic rebound, expecting Bitcoin to reach as high as $250,000 this year, driven by a potential resumption of monetary easing policies.

Amid these market dynamics, the new Trump administration has introduced a crypto working group to propose new regulations and explore a digital assets stockpile.