After suffering the largest single-day liquidation in crypto history on Friday — over $19 billion across centralized and decentralized exchanges— digital asset markets are showing signs of recovery.

As of Monday morning, bitcoin and ether had recovered from Friday’s lows, with bitcoin trading at $115,150 and ether trading at $4,165. 

Chaos Labs CEO Omer Goldberg suggested the day might have been one of DeFi’s worst black swan events.

“On paper, over $19 billion in liquidations hit across CEXs [centralized exchanges] and perp DEXs [perpetual decentralized exchanges]. The real figure was likely higher,” said Goldberg. 

The immediate trigger was a surprise announcement by President Donald Trump, who imposed a 100% tariff on all Chinese imports, sharply escalating the U.S.-China trade war.

The speed of the crash was exacerbated by excessive leverage and cross-margined collateral on exchanges. Fragile liquidity conditions in many altcoins led to outsized price drops, while platforms like Binance and Hyperliquid saw mass auto-liquidations.

The event erased up to $670 billion in crypto market value, far surpassing prior records like the March 2020 COVID crash or the FTX collapse. 

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

DeFi protocols like Uniswap and dYdX handled record volumes without disruption, while centralized exchange Binance faced technical outages and pledged compensation to affected users.

“Funding rates across the crypto market have plunged to their lowest levels since the depths of the 2022 bear market,” noted onchain analytics platform Glassnode.

“This marks one of the most severe leverage resets in crypto history, a clear sign of how aggressively speculative excess has been flushed from the system.”

Still, some analysts are optimistic. “Expecting new [all-time highs] this year, we just need Trump to reach an agreement, which seems the most likely scenario,” wrote economist Alex Kruger on X.