Ethereum and XRP just fell off a cliff in weekend trading, Bitcoin barely flinched, and timing might matter
Crypto has a habit of saving its worst moves for the hours when people are least prepared to deal with them.
This was the mood on Saturday, when Ethereum and XRP fell sharply in a short period, while weekend liquidity was already thin.
On my 30-minute charts, XRP was down around 7.98%, ETH was down around 5.66%, and Bitcoin was relatively stable with a smaller decline of around 3%.
The market as a whole was hit to the tune of approximately $100 billion. CoinMarketCap showed a total crypto market cap of around $2.72 billion, down 3.76% on the day from $2.83 billion, with 24-hour volume of around $134.69 billion at the time of viewing.
Total liquidations over the past 24 hours stand at just under $1 billion at press time, with Ethereum leading the losses with $383 million liquidated.
If you only look at the candles, it seems like another red and ugly day. When you look at where this happened and what the world was discussing at the same time, it starts to look like something more specific: a weekend market pushed, then slipped.
The major risk pointed out
When markets explode like this, thoughts turn to the obvious question: Was there a catalyst over the weekend, or did the market simply collapse?
The moment is difficult to ignore as major media outlets reported Israeli airstrikes on Gaza on Saturday that reportedly left at least 30 Palestinians killed, including women and children.
This does not automatically mean that the strikes caused the displacement. Crypto is not a clean cause and effect market.
Crypto remains the most sensitive risk market trading continuously throughout the weekend, meaning macroeconomic shocks can hit digital assets faster than traditional markets which take a break until Monday.
With no circuit breakers and limited after-hours liquidity, crypto often becomes the first place where risk is reassessed.
However, while Bitcoin has shown relative resilience, the broader altcoin market has plunged much harder, reflecting a sharper decline in speculative appetite beyond BTC.
Why do weekends keep doing this to people?
Crypto is a reflex market. Headlines change mood, mood changes positioning, positioning changes to forced flows and sell-offs, and that’s exactly what a slim weekend book struggles to absorb.
On the weekend, crypto loses its shock absorbers.
There are fewer active traders, fewer market makers getting involved, less order book depth, and more reliance on automated stops and people feeds to do the price discovery work. When the price starts to move, the market can sidetrack in a way that seems unfair, mainly because it is.
Liquidity researchers have been emphasizing the same point for some time: Market cap tells you how big something is, market depth tells you how fragile it is. Kaiko has built much of its work around depth-based metrics that capture how much can be traded near the spot without moving the price too far. Kaiko
This framework matches what we’ve seen, Bitcoin gets hit, ETH gets hit harder, XRP gets hit the hardest, because the pool gets shallower and shallower as you go down the risk curve.
The layer of leverage that turns a decline into a decline
Low liquidity explains the speed. Leverage explains violence.
Deribit’s weekly analyzes from Block Scholes showed how macroeconomic shocks have reverberated through crypto recently, including a rise in Japanese government bond yields, a break below $90,000 for BTC and $3,000 for ETH earlier in the week, and an increase in demand for downside protection.
They noted that BTC and ETH option biases fell to around -9%, meaning that puts became significantly more expensive than calls, and ETH funding briefly turned negative as risk sentiment deteriorated.
You don’t need this exact chain of events to repeat itself minute by minute for the conclusions to matter.
The takeaway is that the market is in a situation where downside hedging is expensive, funding can reverse, and the marginal buyer disappears quickly, especially outside peak times. In this configuration, additional thrust may be important.
The problem of missing weekday auctions
There’s also a quieter problem looming in the background: the market has relied on weekday flows to maintain order.
This month, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen a surge in flows, erasing gains from earlier in the month and highlighting that institutional supply can quickly calm down.
While weekday flows are already unstable, weekends become more dangerous. You get less natural buying on the downside, more finicky positioning, and alts tend to pay the price first.
XRP is a good example because it has shown how quickly it can collapse when positioning becomes crowded. XRP was hit by a cascade of liquidations earlier in January when key levels breached.
This kind of approach leaves a memory on the market. Traders start treating the asset as something that can create a gap, and once they do, they manage it in a way that facilitates the next gap.
The macro fog that continues to drift towards crypto
Even if the Gaza title was the spark, it only landed because the backdrop is already combustible.
Crypto’s broader fall is part of a risk-averse environment, in which investors are turning to safer assets and away from speculative exposure.
This is also where geopolitics plays an indirect role. When tensions rise, commodities and rates may react, inflationary fears may resurface and risk assets suffer. The Financial Times’ commodities coverage has tracked oil’s rise on the risk of Middle East tension, and that’s the kind of cross-market momentum that can seep into crypto sentiment quickly.
Crypto traders do not need to trade oil to be affected by it. They just have to operate in a world where inflation expectations and yields continue to set the tone.
What happens next, three paths that make sense
Here’s the part that matters more than the candle, what this move suggests for the next week or two.
A path is a messy bounce. Liquidity returns at the start of the week, panic selling fades and the market retraces part of the air gap. Volatility can persist because traders remember how quickly the bottom gave way.
Another path is a little further down. If the macroeconomic mood remains defensive and crypto continues to be treated as a high beta risk asset, the market may continue to seek a level where buyers feel comfortable again. Investopedia cited Fundstrat’s Sean Farrell pointing to the mid-$70,000s as a possible lower zone of Bitcoin’s “value zone,” which becomes relevant if BTC cannot stabilize quickly.
The third way is a strange disconnect. Bitcoin is sometimes presented as a geopolitical hedge and sometimes behaves as such, but the evidence is inconsistent and tends to depend on the broader regime, not the headlines of the day. If this path presents itself, you’ll see BTC hold its own while alts remain prominent, and you’ll see it confirmed in cross-asset feeds, not just on crypto Twitter.
Where that leaves people reading this on a Saturday
Many traders were not even at their desks. This is what makes weekend moves personal. You can do everything right during the week, limit your risk, remain patient and still find yourself facing a liquidity deficit on Saturday.
Today’s move fits a pattern, tough weekend conditions, altcoin beta, leverage sensitivity, and a news backdrop that is incentivizing people to de-risk more quickly.
Whether the Gaza strikes were the spark or just the moment the market chose to go off the rails, the takeaway is the same: crypto still has a weekend problem and it shows up most quickly in ETH and XRP.
At the time of going to press 3:41 p.m. UTC January 31, 2026Ethereum is ranked #2 in terms of market capitalization and the price is down 6.22% in the last 24 hours. Ethereum has a market capitalization of $306.53 billion with a 24-hour trading volume of $35.49 billion. Learn more about Ethereum ›
At the time of going to press 3:41 p.m. UTC January 31, 2026the total crypto market is valued at $2.73 trillion with a 24 hour volume of $136.98 billion. Bitcoin dominance is currently at 59.37%. Learn more about the cryptocurrency market ›
