- The crypto market turned red after a new tariff threat from President Trump.
- Trump threatened to halt cooking oil imports from China over soybean purchases.
- Bitcoin fell 2.4 percent and Ether dropped 3.3 percent within an hour of the post.
A single social media post has once again sent a jolt of fear through the cryptocurrency market, as a fresh and unconventional tariff threat from US President Donald Trump ignited a new wave of selling, plunging the entire digital asset space into the red.
The sudden downturn is a stark and painful reminder of the market’s extreme sensitivity to the president’s every whim, a fragility that was brutally exposed in a historic liquidation event just last week.
An ‘economically hostile act,’ an immediate market reaction
The catalyst for the latest sell-off was a post on Truth Social on October 14, in which President Trump took aim at Beijing’s trade behavior, specifically its failure to purchase American soybeans.
“I believe that China purposefully [is] not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, [which] is an Economically Hostile Act,” Trump wrote.
We are considering terminating business with China having to do with Cooking Oil, and other elements of Trade, as retribution. As an example, we can easily produce Cooking Oil ourselves, we don’t need to purchase it from China.
The market’s reaction was immediate and severe. Within an hour of the post, Bitcoin (BTC) had dropped by 2.4 percent to around $112,861, while Ether (ETH) fell 3.3 percent to $4,108.
The total crypto market capitalization declined by roughly 2.9 percent, a clear and direct response to the president’s latest trade war gambit.
The ghost of liquidations past
This latest sell-off, while significant, is a mere aftershock compared to the earthquake that rocked the market last week.
A previous threat from Trump to impose 100 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports had triggered a violent and historic crash.
At its peak, that “bloodbath” saw more than 19.2 billion dollars in leveraged positions liquidated, marking the largest single-day wipeout in crypto’s history and overwhelming major trading platforms like Binance and Coinbase.
The memory of that carnage is still fresh, and it has left the market in a deeply fragile and nervous state.
Even before Trump’s latest post, crypto analysts had been warning of an impending market crash, with one popular analyst telling the trading community on October 13 to exit the market as a “big dump” was coming.
A market on a knife’s edge
The latest data from Coinglass shows that the market is still bleeding from last week’s wounds.
Over the past 24 hours, another 715.13 million dollars in positions have been liquidated, the vast majority of which were bullish long positions.
This new wave of selling, sparked by a presidential post about soybeans and cooking oil, is a potent symbol of the strange and unpredictable forces that now govern the digital asset space.
In a market haunted by the ghost of a historic crash and stalked by the whims of a single Twitter feed, the only certainty is more uncertainty to come.
