Bitcoin Drops to Lowest Price Since Trump Was Elected as Crypto Faces Slump

The price of Bitcoin is now lower than when President Trump was elected in 2024, raising concerns of a new “crypto winter" in the industry.

by · NY Times

The price of Bitcoin is lower than it was the day before President Trump’s election. A leading cryptocurrency exchange is laying off a large chunk of its work force. And a push for industry-friendly legislation has stalled in Congress.

After months of declining prices and dispiriting setbacks, the crypto industry has found itself deep in one of its periodic slumps — a so-called crypto winter.

Bitcoin is trading at less than $64,000, a nearly 50 percent decline from its peak price, which it reached just last October. The prices of two other top coins, Ether and Solana, are both down more than 30 percent over the past week.

At the same time, the stock prices of major crypto firms have plummeted. Strategy, a company that buys enormous amounts of Bitcoin, is down 75 percent since November 2024, when Mr. Trump was newly elected and promised to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.”

All the bad news has now cemented into one of the worst crises in the crypto industry since 2022, when the FTX exchange collapsed after an $8 billion fraud. This time, the market’s decline has been driven partly by a type of risky trading that caused a sudden market crisis late last year.

The downturn is especially disappointing for the industry because it has come at a time when the White House is embracing crypto and promising to boost the industry in the United States. The plunging prices show how vulnerable Bitcoin remains to broader economic trends, like the pressures on the larger tech industry that have caused a marketwide sell-off in recent days.

“A lot of times it has behaved basically like a tech stock,” said John Todaro, a crypto analyst at Needham. “You have some market participants selling it — going, ‘I don’t want just another tech exposure.’”

Already the consequences of the downturn are coming into focus. On Thursday, the Gemini exchange, a publicly traded crypto firm, announced that it was laying off 25 percent of its work force and ending its operations in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Australia.

“This is starting to look like the retrenchment we had in 2022,” said Corey Frayer, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official who worked on crypto issues.

A spokeswoman for Gemini did not respond to a request for comment.

The pain has been particularly severe for the growing class of public companies that invest in digital currencies.

The largest of those firms is Strategy, which owns more than 700,000 Bitcoins. On Thursday, Strategy reported a net loss of $12.4 billion in the last three months of 2025, compared with $670.8 million in losses over the same period a year earlier.

“Quarter-to-quarter moves like this can be sharp, can also be unsettling,” Andrew Kang, the company’s chief financial officer, said in an earnings call after the results were released. “But it’s important to emphasize that our strategy is built for the long term.”

Since Bitcoin was created in 2008, the crypto industry has endured repeated booms and busts. But when the price of Bitcoin hit $100,000 in December 2024, the industry hoped that the crypto markets would achieve a new level of stability.

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Mr. Trump promised to end a regulatory crackdown on crypto and created a crypto empire of his own, with Trump-branded digital coins and a crypto start-up run by his sons. Some investors predicted that Bitcoin would soon surge even higher, reaching $250,000 within a year.

That hasn’t panned out. Starting last fall, the crypto industry endured a series of punishing setbacks.

First, the market cratered in October, a downturn that was driven partly by broad economic trends, like Mr. Trump’s trade threats. But the decline was also exacerbated by investors who had borrowed large amounts of money to make ever-bigger bets on crypto prices.

When the crypto market surges, those types of risky bets can lead to enormous returns. In a downturn, they make the damage even worse.

Even the Trump family was not immune to the market chaos. The price of WLFI, a cryptocurrency developed by one of the Trump businesses, has fallen about 50 percent since late September. American Bitcoin, a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company backed by Mr. Trump’s sons, also saw its stock price plunge.

The problems continued to mount in January. For months, the industry has lobbied in Washington for sweeping legislation that would create new industry-friendly rules, protecting crypto companies from a regulatory crackdown.

A version of the bill passed the House over the summer and was set for a key committee vote in the Senate last month — until a dispute over one of its provisions caused the process to stall.

The federal government is unlikely to come to the industry’s rescue. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a congressional hearing that the government had no power to order banks to buy Bitcoin in an effort to stop the price decline.

The last time crypto crashed, many of the industry’s top companies conducted mass layoffs. One of them was Gemini, an exchange founded by the twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

In its new round of cuts, the company hopes to “meaningfully accelerate our path to profitability even in the backdrop of the current crypto market,” the Winklevosses wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

On social media, some crypto experts have expressed a sense of gloom, lamenting the industry’s latest meltdown.

Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder of the influential crypto trading firm Wintermute, wrote that he was concerned that some of the industry’s early idealism had drained away in the chase for profits.

Bitcoin’s “reason for existence completely lost behind ‘number go up,’” he wrote. “Same goes for most of ‘crypto’ really.”

Despite that, he said, “I’m somehow optimistic for the industry as a whole.”

Kailyn Rhone contributed reporting.

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