Crypto takes deep slide despite Trump’s pledge

Bitcoin price now lower than when President Trump was elected in 2024

- DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY

An image of then-President-elect Donald Trump with cryptocurrency tokens, at a Coinhero store in Hong Kong in January 2025.

(PHOTO: BLOOMBERG)

The price of bitcoin is lower than it was the day before President Donald Trump’s election. A leading cryptocurrency exchange is laying off a large chunk of its workforce. 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% decline from its peak price, which it reached in October. The prices of two other top coins, ether and Solana, are both down more than 30% 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% since November 2024, when 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.