One year on from the crash traders still call "10/10," Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $83,460 on Wednesday, roughly 34% below the record that preceded the sell-off.

The Bitcoin price printed what was then an all-time high around $126,200 on October 6, 2025, capping a months-long rally. Four days later, on October 10, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States would impose an additional 100% tariff on Chinese imports, set to take effect on November 1, 2025, in response to China's newly announced export controls on rare earth minerals. Notably, the trigger sat outside the crypto industry: a trade-policy headline rather than a token collapse or exchange failure.

Crypto markets reacted within minutes. Bitcoin, which traded near $122,000 immediately before the post, slid by double digits within hours, touching intraday lows near $104,000 on major venues, while several exchanges printed far lower prices amid strained liquidity — a divergence that shows how thin order books can widen price gaps when selling accelerates. Ether and most alternative tokens fell harder still, with numerous mid- and small-cap assets dropping between 30% and 80% at the deepest point of the move. Leverage compounded the slide, since falling prices force the automatic closure of borrowed positions, adding further sell pressure.

Derivatives data tracked by Coinglass showed approximately $19 billion in leveraged positions liquidated within 24 hours, affecting more than 1.6 million trading accounts. The cascade stands as the largest single-day liquidation event in cryptocurrency market history, exceeding the turmoil that followed the TerraUSD collapse in May 2022 and the failure of the FTX exchange in November 2022 — both of which originated inside the industry rather than from macro policy.

The threatened 100% tariff never took effect as announced. In late October 2025, ahead of a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Washington and Beijing agreed to a temporary de-escalation of trade tensions, and the measure was shelved. The episode is also why the date still resonates: a single policy post, meeting a widely leveraged market, produced the largest one-day liquidation tally on record — and within weeks the catalyst itself had been defused.

Even so, the market has not returned to its pre-crash peak. On the first anniversary of the sell-off, Bitcoin trades near $83,460, roughly 34% below the record of about $126,200 set on October 6, 2025. For market watchers, the inputs that defined 10/10 — trade-policy developments between Washington and Beijing, and liquidation data from trackers such as Coinglass — remain the concrete data points to monitor as new policy headlines arrive.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/bitcoin-1010-crash-anniversary-19b-liquidations