January Crypto Recap: Nvidia Down, Alts Down, What Next?

Since February 1st over $500B has been wiped off the global crypto market cap amid a surge of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) befalling the US market. Some of that FUD had to do with Trump imposing new tariffs on trading partners, creating the potential for a trade war to negatively impact the market.

The rest of the bearish sentiment might be attributed to Nvidia taking the largest single day decline in US history after being shown up by DeepSeek, a China based AI startup.

We know the market relies heavily on sentiment, and after a bullish end to 2024 you could say we were due for a pull back. The good news is we may have been pointed towards some new market opportunities.

Let’s start with the good news before recapping some epic losses from the week that was.

According to Eric Trump, there will soon be no capital gains tax for US-based crypto tokens like SOL, XRP, SUI, and HBAR to name a few. This is especially huge for day traders who treat their capital gains as they would regular income, being taxed as high as 37% in some situations.

Considering the giant dump the crypto market took over the weekend, this news comes just in time to line up some good value buys.

RippleNet, the global network of banks and payment processors that functions on the currency XRP, is already used to process cross-border transactions for Santander and other major banks in many countries. Learn more about how XRP functions here.

Since marking an all time high at nearly $3.40 just a few weeks ago, XRP crashed to about $2 last night. It’s currently floating around $2.20, which is more than 30% off its 7-day high.

Solana (SOL) is the 5th largest crypto in the world by market cap, and the 2nd largest US based. The Solana ecosystem is vast and constantly growing. It is a direct competitor to ETH in that it is a layer 1 chain that enables the development of applications, but in many cases has been considered superior due to its speed and low cost transactions. You can read more about SOL vs ETH and their longevity here.

SOL is also the entry point to one of the most diverse meme coin markets in crypto, even drawing $TRUMP coin to launch on its chain instead of ETH. Since starting February at $230, it dropped as low as $180 last night, about a 20% loss.

It was a rough week for US traders. Starting with China based AI startup, Deepseek, taking a historic chunk out of the market cap of the most valuable company in the country, Nvidia, and following that up with yesterday’s declines across the entire crypto market really poured salt in the wound.

Since February 1st, Bitcoin took a 10% plunge from ~$102,000 to as low as $92,000, and Ethereum said “hold my beer” before it took a nearly 30% plunge from ~3,300 to as low as $2,300 in the same 48 hour span. These bottoms came in yesterday as the market responded to Trump’s new proposed Tariffs on imports from China, Canada, and Mexico.

The news evidently sparked a ton of FUD from investors across the board, and considering the typical volatility of the market it’s hard to say where the bleeding will stop. This sentiment could have been amplified by what happened earlier that week in the stock market.

On January 27th Nvidia (NVDA) took the largest single day loss of market capitalization in US history, almost $600B totaling about 17%. Interesting to note that this more than doubles the previous largest loss in US history, also achieved by Nvidia less than 6 months ago according to this Bloomberg article.

If you’ve been following along, you know that Nvidia GPUs have been hot on the market with the release of the 50 series last week, but that didn’t save the stock price. The sell off was triggered by DeepSeek’s new AI model, the R1, which appears to have comparable performance at a fraction of the cost of other models.

This article explains how the US has had somewhat of a monopoly on cutting edge AI models because they’ve been powered by US based Nvidia, and how DeepSeek was able to do much more with supposedly outdated Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia has certainly led the charge in AI development over the last few years, but it seems that the technology has come far enough that it can be developed and applied effectively without having to spend billions on Nvidia’s tech.

US investors are walking through the fire right now, but those that have been through it before know that times like these are just strong buying opportunities. So wipe your tears, fund those accounts, and get some size into whatever coins you’ve been eyeing; the time is now.

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