March continues crypto slide as market sentiment | Australian Markets

The crypto market continued its post-tariff collapse, dropping 4.4% in March, amid escalating trade tensions and ongoing uncertainty round a potential Fed fee cut, with market sentiment on cryptos sinking to a new low.

The March drop continues the crypto sector’s February price droop, which noticed the sector lose 20.2% in market cap, main crypto exchange platform Binance revealed in its latest month-to-month market replace.

This is, nonetheless, nonetheless properly off the 2022 price crash, with crypto’s worth sinking by 65% over a successive three-month Q2 decline.

Total crypto market capitalisation has dropped an estimated 25.9% from January highs — wiping out round US$1 trillion in worth, which, in response to Binance, has underscored its sensitivity to macroeconomic instability.

The March 2025 drop noticed Bitcoin lose almost a quarter (19.1%) of its worth because the Trump Administration flagged the introduction of tariffs, whereas Ethereum, the second-most standard crypto coin, was down 44%. Bitcoin is presently valued at US$80,637 (AU$129,134) per coin, whereas Etherum is presently at US$1,541 (AU$ 2,467). ‎

However, altcoins have been the most important losers over this period, with Memecoin, Artificial Intelligence, and Layer 2 all shedding more than half their worth on this period.

Bucking the pattern was Toncoin (TON), created by Telegram Messager app founder Nikolai Durov, which surged 17.1% final month following a disclosure by the TON Foundation that over US$400 million in TON had been bought from early traders by blockchain targeted enterprise capital corporations together with Sequoia, Ribbit, and Benchmark, alongside a important rise in native accounts, (up 4 million to 41 million over the previous 12 months).

“The broad selloff has erased early-year gains across much of the crypto market, pushing even BTC into negative territory year-to-date (YTD) as of early April — despite its strong performance in 2024,” Binance famous.

Doge coin (-17.6%), Solana (-15.8%) and Link (-9.7%) additionally noticed notable price retreats.

Locally, nonetheless, Australian merchants largely caught with Bitcoin, with Ripple and Cardano seeing beneficial properties off the back of Trump’s announcement of a Strategic Crypto Reserve (which incorporates these cash). Others being thought-about for inclusion within the Reserve additionally noticed modest will increase in worth.

Tariff ache

Since the primary spherical of tariffs, introduced in early February, the crypto sector has misplaced more than a quarter of its worth (25.9%), following the drop within the S&P 500, which declined 17.1% over the identical period.

Binance notes that crypto belongings have moved “largely in lockstep with equities, with both experiencing cooling demand, broad selloffs, and a slide into correction territory”.

Meanwhile, gold, the normal secure haven asset during occasions of financial tumult, has rallied to 10.3%, breaking successive all-time highs.

The tariff tensions bubbled over in March, with the imposition of trade imposts on Canada and Mexico, contributing to a US$1 billion crypto liquidation in cryptocurrency by-product markets on 4 March.

March has seen market sentiment flip decidedly cautious on crypto, Binance wrote in its replace, with traders displaying “classic ‘risk-off’ behaviour”.

This sentiment was mirrored in a latest fund supervisor survey, Binance discovered, with solely 3% of respondents stating they might allocate to Bitcoin within the present setting (that’s, within the present trade battle). This is in sharp distinction to gold, which was favoured by 58%.

The US Dollar (favoured by simply 15% of traders), 30-Year Treasury bonds (9%) and 3-month T-bills (4%) have been equally in disfavour.

Binance, which trades round half the worldwide crypto spot trading quantity, notes that crypto markets are behaving more and more like risk belongings.

“A protracted trade battle might proceed to weigh on capital flows and dampen demand for digital belongings within the close to time period.

“As a result, capital that might have entered crypto is either staying on the sidelines or shifting into perceived safe havens like gold.”