Crypto market loses 4.2 percent in a day: why Ethereum is giving up 5.4 percent

The crypto market gave way across the board on Thursday, and the trigger does not lie in the sector itself. Equities, oil and bonds set the tempo: as the Nasdaq Composite shed 2.1 percent over the session and Brent crude climbed to a five-month high, investors pulled back from everything counted as risky. Ether was hit harder than Bitcoin.

On Thursday afternoon Ether costs $2,376.99, 5.4 percent less than 24 hours earlier. Bitcoin stands at $81,176.09, down 4.0 percent. The crypto market as a whole has shrunk 4.2 percent over the same period, to $2.83 trillion. This assessment was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on October 22, 2026.

If you hold crypto in Germany, a day like this changes nothing about the technology behind your coins and nothing about their custody. It may well change something about your liquidation price, about your tax bill for this year, and about whether your balance sits with an exchange licensed in the EU. This article first sets out the causes and then works through the points that can genuinely be checked today.

What triggered the sell-off: equity markets, the oil price and bond yields

The market report from Yahoo Finance describes a classic risk-off picture for the session. Risk-off denotes a market phase in which investors withdraw money from volatile assets and shift into safer ones. The Dow Jones lost 0.2 percent, the S&P 500 gave up 1.2 percent, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell furthest, by 2.1 percent.

The relevant part for the crypto market is that technology stocks were precisely the ones to fall hardest. Bitcoin and Ether have correlated more closely with the Nasdaq than with gold for years, because the same investor groups manage the same risk budgets. As that budget tightens, the most volatile positions are the first to go.

Pressure also came from the commodity side. According to the same report, Brent crude passed the $111 a barrel mark and West Texas Intermediate traded above $98. The report calls it a five-month high. In the bond market the yield on ten-year US Treasuries fell eleven basis points to 5.02 percent, the thirty-year by ten basis points to 5.32 percent. Falling yields alongside falling equities point to capital moving into safe havens, rather than to investors betting on cheaper money.

A quarterly report added to the strain on sentiment in the technology sector. Meta's shares fell markedly according to the same report, as investors digested the quarterly result and an announced two-for-one stock split. Tesla reported adjusted quarterly earnings of $0.48 a share against $0.44 expected, on revenue of $28.05 billion against $28.13 billion expected.

Why a high oil price feeds through to crypto prices

The link runs through inflation expectations. When oil rises sharply, market participants expect higher transport and production costs and therefore more stubborn inflation. More stubborn inflation narrows the room central banks have to cut rates. And the longer rates stay high, the more expensive it becomes to hold capital in assets that throw off no running income. Bitcoin and Ether belong to that group.

The mechanism explains why a crypto day without any sector-specific news can look red. There was no major hack on Thursday, no central bank decision on crypto assets and no new rule out of Brussels. The move came from outside.

Ether loses 5.4 percent, Bitcoin 4.0 percent

The gap between the two largest crypto assets is the most striking detail of the day. Ethereum gives up 5.4 percent, around a third more than Bitcoin at 4.0 percent. Over a week the difference is smaller: Ether stands 2.7 percent lower than seven days ago, Bitcoin 1.4 percent.

The pattern is the rule in downward phases, not a special case. Ether counts as the more heavily leveraged of the two on the futures market, and it is the asset on which the larger part of decentralised finance hangs. When the price falls, loans in that system become more thinly collateralised, which can set off further selling. Bitcoin does not carry that structure to the same degree.

Bitcoin dominance, meaning Bitcoin's share of total crypto market capitalisation, stands accordingly at 57.4 percent. Its rising on a red day is usual: investors part with the smaller assets first.

Around $400 million in liquidations, mostly long positions

A liquidation is the forced closure of a leveraged position by the exchange. It bites as soon as the collateral posted no longer covers the loss. The trader is not asked; the position is closed at the market price, and the collateral is gone.

For the past 24 hours, data from CoinGlass shows forced closures in the order of around $400 million, as does the market report linked above. Depending on when the snapshot is taken, the figures circulating for the day range between roughly $370 million and $400 million. The range is given deliberately: the value shifts with every hour that slides into the window.

By far the greater part of that sum fell on long positions, that is, on bets on rising prices. Days like this therefore often run steeper than the triggering news would suggest. Every forced closure of a long position is itself a sale. When enough of them arrive at once, the price is pushed further down, which reaches the next row of positions.

The figure still needs to be put in proportion. Just under $400 million is not an unusual value measured against the $115.5 billion in trading volume the market turned over in the same 24 hours. This Thursday is some way off a liquidation wave in the sense of the billion-dollar days the market saw in mid-October.

23 of 25 large crypto assets down: how broad the move was

A daily loss in Bitcoin says little about how broadly a move carries. Hence the cross-check across the field: of the 25 largest crypto assets by market capitalisation, excluding stablecoins and pegged representations such as Wrapped Bitcoin or Staked Ether, 23 were down on Thursday afternoon. Only two stood higher than the previous day. This assessment was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on October 22, 2026.

The most prominent of the two outliers is Monero, up 1.8 percent with a weekly gain of 13.2 percent. A privacy-focused asset decoupling on a risk-off day is a story of its own and no signal for the broad market.

Market breadth of this kind places the day: a retreat from the asset class as a whole, not a problem with individual projects. If your portfolio did worse than Bitcoin on this day, you do not necessarily have to look for a project-specific cause.

Zcash, Uniswap and NEAR lead the losers' list

At the bottom sits Zcash, down 11.4 percent on the day at $1,206.55. Over a week the asset holds up better than the daily picture suggests, at 1.8 percent lower, which points to profit-taking after a strong run.

Then come Uniswap, down 8.7 percent at $6.94, NEAR, down 8.4 percent at $4.91, and Avalanche, down 8.2 percent at $9.11. Cardano loses 7.3 percent to $0.2117, Chainlink 6.3 percent to $11.87, Dogecoin 5.8 percent to $0.0784. XRP gives up 5.3 percent to $1.3153, Solana 4.5 percent to $103.64, BNB 3.0 percent to $727.81.

The order roughly follows volatility: the smaller an asset and the more heavily it is traded on leverage, the bigger its swing on a day like this. TRON falls out of the pattern, down 1.3 percent.

How to check your liquidation price and funding rate

If you hold only coins on an exchange or in your own wallet, without credit and without a derivative, a liquidation cannot reach you. The price swings, your number of units stays. This section concerns you only if you are running leverage.

In that case the liquidation price is the number that counts. It appears in every position overview and tells you at which price the exchange closes your position. Three things are worth examining on a day like today: how far that price sits from the current level, how much collateral you still have, and whether the funding rate has turned against you.

The funding rate is the payment that flows regularly between the long and short side in perpetual futures and ties the contract price to the spot price. When it is negative, the short positions pay the long positions, and the other way round. A position held against the funding rate over several days costs money even when the price stands still.

On handling leverage itself there is no universally valid number, and this article deliberately names none. What can be said: leverage shortens the distance between price and liquidation price proportionally. To widen that distance, you can raise the collateral or reduce the position size; both shift the same number.

MiCA and the way in: which exchanges are licensed in Germany

MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets and is the EU regulation governing trading in crypto assets across the single market. Since it applies in full, a provider targeting customers in Germany needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider in an EU member state. That authorisation then takes effect across the single market.

On a volatile day this matters for one practical reason. If you want to buy more or sell and find that your existing provider no longer offers the business to customers in Germany, switching comes at the start of your decision rather than at the end. Which platforms hold the licence, and how they differ on fees and deposit routes, we have put together in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges compared.

Two further things are worth a look in your provider's terms: whether euro deposits and withdrawals run without a detour via a stablecoin, and whether limits apply during strong market moves that do not otherwise apply. Both are in the terms of use, not in the help centre.

Holding period and loss offsetting under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act

Crypto assets held as private assets count for tax purposes as other economic goods. A sale therefore falls under private disposal transactions in Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act and is charged at your personal income tax rate, not at the flat withholding rate. Once the one-year holding period has run, a gain from private assets is as a rule tax free.

Within the year an exemption threshold of €1,000 applies. An exemption threshold is not an allowance: if your gains from all private disposal transactions in a calendar year stay below it, they are tax free; once the threshold is reached, the entire gain is taxable. The threshold covers all transactions under Section 23, not only crypto assets.

On a red day the opposite direction is the interesting one. Losses from private disposal transactions can be offset against gains in the same category, in the same year or carried forward into later years. They do have to appear in the tax return, and for that a traceable record of every purchase and sale is needed. Note also that swapping one coin for another counts for tax as a sale of the old coin, and starts a fresh period for the new one.

This section does not replace tax advice and reflects the position as of the publication date.

Custody on the exchange or in your own hands

A price slump is not a custody problem, but it is a good occasion to look at your own set-up. If your coins sit on an exchange, what you own are claims against that exchange and not the coins themselves. That is immaterial in normal operation and becomes an issue only if the provider runs into trouble.

Self-custody denotes custody under your own responsibility, where only you know the private key. It takes counterparty risk off your hands and puts the full responsibility for securing your recovery words on you instead. Anyone working with larger amounts commonly splits the two in practice: a trading balance on the exchange, the holding in their own custody.

Crypto market sell-off: below $2.83 trillion the floor is missing

As long as the pressure from equity markets, the oil price and rate expectations persists, this market has no reason of its own to recover. The market capitalisation of $2.83 trillion is the number from which it can be read whether the retreat continues or runs out. Three things can be dealt with concretely today:

1. Go through leveraged positions. Note the liquidation price, the remaining collateral and the funding rate for each open position. How the platforms differ on fees and liquidation mechanics is shown in our comparison of perp DEX providers.
2. Document losses while the data is still complete. Export purchase and sale times, unit numbers and prices before a change of provider tears the history apart. Which tools automate that and prepare it under German law is set out in our overview of crypto tax tools.
3. Review the custody of your holding. Decide which part of your coins has to sit on the exchange permanently and which belongs in your own custody. The devices and how they differ are in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 22, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)