Why is crypto down right now? I've been watching the charts over the past couple months and honestly, it's not just one thing — it's a perfect storm of like six different factors hitting the market at once.

First, there's Trump's tariff shock from late February. A 15% global tariff announcement sent everything into risk-off mode. Bitcoin dropped over 5% in hours, and the whole market treated crypto like a macro risk asset instead of a hedge. When trade gets tighter, everything sells off together.

Then Microsoft earnings disappointed hard in late January — that 10% drop rippled straight into crypto. The whole tech sector got dragged down, and since crypto's now correlated with tech stocks, we followed. Gold even fell alongside us, which broke the safe-haven narrative people were betting on.

The liquidations were brutal. Early February hit us with $2.56 billion in a single day, and then February 5 was even worse — $3.2 billion in realized losses. That kind of cascade just keeps pushing prices lower as automated selling triggers more selling. Over that first week of February, we're talking $3-4 billion in total liquidations.

What really concerns me though is the structural shift. Bitcoin ETFs flipped from being net buyers last year to net sellers in February 2026. That institutional bid that held prices up all through 2025? Gone. CoinShares reported $1.7 billion in outflows over two weeks. And it's not just ETF holders — the long-term Bitcoin holders, the "OGs" with super low cost bases, they're distributing too.

Technically, Bitcoin broke below the 365-day moving average for the first time since March 2022. That's a big deal because that level held through the entire bull run. Weekly RSI dropped below 30, which historically marks either capitulation or the start of sustained bear pressure. We're down about 50% from the $126K peak in October.

Geopolitical stuff didn't help either. U.S.-Iran tensions pushed capital into cash instead of risk assets. Even silver got hit hard, which told me investors weren't rotating between assets — they were just bailing into cash.

So that's why crypto is down. It's not one catalyst, it's all of these converging at once. Bitcoin's sitting around $71K now, Ethereum's at $2.20K, XRP at $1.33, Solana at $82. The fear index is still pretty low, which historically is where buyers show up, so maybe we're getting close to stabilizing. But we need to see ETF flows reverse and some clarity on tariffs before I'd feel confident calling a bottom.