Donald Trump's sweeping global tariffs have scythed through all sectors of the economy — including crypto, a market that the sitting president was hailed as a champion of.

On Thursday, the morning after Trump signed an executive order enacting his "Liberation Day" tariffs, blockchain assets across the board slumped considerably as a mass sell-off ensued. 

Bitcoin, the first and largest cryptocurrency, fell by 4.2 percent down to about $82,200, according to CoinDesk data, liberating nearly $6,000 in value. Ether, meanwhile, tumbled by 5.6 percent to around $1,700.

The downturn reverberated through major crypto entities. Among exchanges, Reuters reports, Coinbase Global fell by 7.7 percent, and Strategy, a major Bitcoin holder, followed with a 5.6 percent loss. One of the world's largest crypto miners, Marathon Digital Holdings, stumbled by 8.3 percent.

According to the Crypto Fear & Greed Index, which gauges market sentiment for Bitcoin and other major crypto, the prevailing mood is "extreme fear." Yesterday, pre-tariffs, it was "neutral."

Some crypto leaders remain bullish. "There are no tariffs on Bitcoin," wrote Michael Saylor, cofounder and chairman at Strategy and a notable Bitcoin evangelist, in a tweet Thursday morning.

Crypto taking collateral damage from the tariffs is ironic, given that advocates of decentralized assets promised that it'd be above the hype- and panic-driven vicissitudes of the old-fashioned stock market — which, by the way, is also absolutely foundering in the wake of Trump's "reciprocal" action. Over $2 trillion was vaporized Thursday from the S&P 500, an index that tracks five hundred of the US's largest publicly traded stocks, Bloomberg reports. 

Deepening the irony, Trump was perceived as friendly to the crypto industry, even peddling his own dodgy meme coin that crashed and burned in a way that stank of a rug pull. Crypto soared in the wake of his election victory — as did the stock market.

The two may not be so unlike each other after all. These latest crypto declines are indicative of a growing correlation between digital assets and macroeconomic policy shifts, Marcin Kazmierczak, CEO at blockchain firm RedStone, told Reuters. "But protectionist policies that potentially weaken dollar hegemony could accelerate interest in decentralized alternatives over the medium-to-long term," he added.

Then again, there's no accounting for plain old fear. The tariffs have been looming for a while now, but their actual scale has clearly startled investors, with Chinese goods slammed with a 54 percent import tax. Even allies like Japan have been smacked with a 24 percent hike.

"Uncertainty breeds caution in all markets, and crypto is experiencing a tension between short-term speculation, slow-moving policy shifts, and institutional pullback," Gadi Chait, investment manager at Xapo Bank, told Forbes. "When fears of inflation driven by tariff uncertainty rise, crypto suffers in the short term. In the past few weeks, bitcoin has been trading within a wide range of $76,600 to $94,500."

In other words, crypto has always been volatile, so a rebound is likely — but by no means guaranteed.

"If prices break decisively below $76,600, it could signal a significant shift in market sentiment," Chait said.

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