The cryptocurrency market faced a broad sell-off after Bitcoin fell below the $80,000 level, triggering losses across major digital assets amid heightened market volatility.
Last Updated: February 11, 2026 at 8:28 PM UTC +1
Published: February 04, 2026 at 5:50 PM UTC +1
Human Written Content
Human Written Content
Dealing in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other large cryptocurrencies in the lead up to a selloff that has destroyed billions of dollars worth of trading, and led to massive liquidations on exchanges, crypto markets fell further broadly today. The rout comes as economic uncertainty over the medium-term, regulation and investor sentiment on digital assets have declined.
Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest cryptocurrency in market capitalization, slipped below the psychologically important $80,000 level, and was trading near $77,000 at the time of writing earlier today — numbers not logged for several months. That marks a steep pullback from recent highs and mirrors a downward spiral in which BTC has fallen sharply since its peak at around $126,000 last year.
According to market trackers, the overall cryptocurrency market cap is around $2.6–$2.7 trillion, with Bitcoin dominance firming slightly as altcoins struggle to match Bitcoin’s relative stability.
Ethereum (ETH), the second largest cryptocurrency to trade in the world, is down with Bitcoin along the way, while prices have plunged over the past 24 hours and a week. Many of the world’s top altcoins — such as Solana (SOL), XRP and Binance Coin (BNB) — have similarly suffered declines that ranged from 3% to over 8% in daily trading.
Market traders and analysts say that overall sell-offs in altcoins also often follow Bitcoin weakness as traders reduce exposure to riskier assets amid falling prices and heightened volatility.
One of the most marked characteristics of this slide has been the extent of liquidations — forced closings of leveraged positions on futures markets. In the past few sessions, Wall Street analysts project that over $2.5 billion in positions involving levered trading got wiped out -- a large fraction of these are long bets that prices continue to increase for some time.
The liquidation of that magnitude reflects a lot of stress in leveraged traders and indicates they lose trust in immediate price recovery. Capital has flowed out of the futures markets as traders try to close positions and limit losses.
A wider financial backdrop has added pressure on crypto markets. In traditional markets, rising geopolitical tensions have already shifted the view and raised investors’ risk expectations, while the rise of inflation worries has also helped make them risk averse. Some analysts viewed crypto’s latest slide in recent trade as part of a broader move away from speculative asset risk and towards safer forms of asset class — government bonds or precious metals — a wider diversification of some of the risk away from speculative assets.
The recent rapid decline in gold and silver prices in the recent run-up, after spikes the day before, reflects this same changing risk-taking sentiment, too.
And regulatory uncertainty affects sentiment in the stock price.
Market anxiety has been exacerbated by regulatory developments. In the US and many markets worldwide, policymakers are still hashing out guidelines for cryptocurrency governance, compliance, and taxation. While recent legislation has not come into effect, discussions — especially around stablecoin regulation and exchange standards — have tempered caution among institutions as well as retail traders.
Currency regulation news media continue to report further developments on new proposals on which lawmakers and regulators have increasingly been asking concerns over investor safeguards, anti-money laundering standards and how best to run the rules for the digital asset markets.
From a trading standpoint, the decline under $80,000 to Bitcoin is interpreted in technics to be a major psychological obstacle by the majority of brokering heads. After breaching those levels, such levels can command additional sell orders from algorithmic trading systems or stop-loss orders from retail investors. Combined with enormous leveraged positions being forced into shutdown, this most certainly added to the selling pressure.
In previous years similar threshold violations have been associated with increased volatility, briefly increased demand, after which attacks on essential support levels surged anew.
Investor surveys and derivative markets indicate a short-term transition in sentiment from bullish to cautious or bearish with respect to sentiment for some time to come in investor sentiment. Predictive markets and options pricing are pricing in Bitcoin as it suggests an increasing belief that Bitcoin further retraces a path, before it stabilizes, with some bettors estimating prospects for sub-$70,000 prices before a rebound is finally sustainable.
Retail traders are becoming more wary of entering in new positions, with institutional investors seemingly reducing or regrouping against greater exposure or redeploying to lower-volatility categories.
Both centralized and decentralized exchanges have posted increases in trades — but with more sell orders than purchase skew. This plays into a larger liquidity imbalance: as the number of sellers increases, and at what was previously a relatively low point, more traders look to sell, fewer buyers push up, price goes down.
Some decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms have also seen increased activity as users look to hedge and rebalance positions.
Even in the near-term downturn, many long-term crypto supporters of crypto remind their friends that volatility is natural for digital asset markets. Investors tend to value crypto-assets over time, however, they note that Bitcoin and other assets have bounced back in the past following downturns, particularly when it comes to institutional custodians putting in large amounts of capital in place or adopting assets (e.g. upgrades and new use cases) that led to higher use (e.g. new technologies).
That said, forecasting the specific time or price point for a market fall is still difficult. Traders are looking for evidence of reduced liquidation events, enhanced regulatory guidance and a macroeconomic shift to more risk-on sentiment as potential triggers for a recovery.
Experienced analysts often cite on-chain metrics such as exchange inflows/outflows and network activity to gauge underlying demand at the time of price moves — although those can also lag price action.
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