- Lead. Bitcoin fell to $73,761 late Sunday — its lowest level since August — before recovering above $75,000 as leveraged traders were forced to close positions.
- Fact. More than $1 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated in 24 hours, with ether absorbing nearly twice as many losses as bitcoin.
- Stake. The drop cut across two separate catalysts: a boardroom crisis at Nvidia and the collapse of Iran diplomacy, suggesting crypto is now tightly coupled to macro and geopolitical shock.
Bitcoin fell to $73,761 on Sunday evening, its lowest price since August, as two unrelated events landed within hours of each other and triggered a cascade of forced liquidations in leveraged cryptocurrency positions. The price recovered to above $75,000 within hours, but the bounce was fragile; analysts noted the token remained trapped between its 200-day moving average at approximately $73,150 and resistance at the 100-day average near $77,430.
The Triggers: Nvidia and Iran
Nvidia’s board announced on Sunday that it had opened an independent investigation into CEO Jensen Huang’s reported affair with a Singapore-based chip executive that US intelligence agencies believe has been passing information to Beijing. Nvidia shares fell 4.27% on Monday, and tokenised Nvidia stock — NVDAX — was already pricing in a drop before US markets opened. The news hit hard in a crypto market that has tracked AI and semiconductor sentiment closely since late 2024, as large allocators have treated AI chip dominance as a macro theme bridging equities and digital assets.
The second trigger was diplomatic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Iran had presented demands he called “outrageous,” and that formal US-Iran negotiations had stalled. The breakdown came as markets had been pricing some probability of a de-escalation that would ease Gulf shipping pressures and reduce the geopolitical risk premium embedded in oil and financial assets.
The Liquidation Cascade
Data from derivatives analytics firm CoinGlass showed that more than $1 billion in leveraged positions were unwound in the 24 hours ending late Sunday. Long positions — bets that prices would rise — accounted for $913 million of that figure. Ether bore disproportionate losses: $448 million in ETH liquidations, nearly double bitcoin’s $272 million. The largest single liquidation was a $48 million ether position, an unusually large size that pointed to an institutional rather than retail unwind.
The pattern fit a classic liquidation cascade: a sharp price move pushes leveraged longs below their margin thresholds, triggering automatic sell orders that push prices lower still, triggering further liquidations in a feedback loop. Bitcoin ETFs had already seen $1.28 billion in outflows in the prior week, thinning the cushion of natural buying that might otherwise have absorbed Sunday’s shock.
Stocks Rally While Crypto Falls
The divergence between equities and crypto on Monday was notable. The Nasdaq gained close to 3%, led by a rebound in semiconductor and AI-infrastructure names that had sold off sharply in the prior week. The S&P 500 also closed higher, with investors apparently concluding that the Nvidia boardroom episode was a governance problem rather than a business-model threat. Bitcoin, by contrast, failed to participate in the recovery, closing near $74,800 — well below its recent range — as traders awaited Tuesday’s US October inflation data for the next directional cue.
According to CoinDesk, the BTC rebound had already stalled by Monday evening, leaving the asset in a technically precarious position heading into a week that also includes Anthropic’s Nasdaq roadshow and the first full trading day under the reinstated US affiliates export-control rule.