Ethereum and XRP just fell off a cliff in weekend trading, Bitcoin barely flinched, and the timing might matter
Crypto has a habit of saving its worst moves for the hours when people are least prepared to deal with them.
That was the vibe on Saturday, when Ethereum and XRP dropped hard in a short burst, right as weekend liquidity was already thin.
On my 30-minute charts, XRP was down about 7.98%, ETH was down about 5.66%, and Bitcoin was comparatively steady with a smaller drawdown of around 3%.
The broader market took the hit to the tune of around $100 billion. CoinMarketCap showed a total crypto market cap of about $2.72T, down 3.76% on the day from $2.83T, with a 24-hour volume of around $134.69B at the time of viewing.
If you only look at the candles, it reads like another ugly red day. When you look at where it happened, and what the world was talking about at the same time, it starts to feel like something more specific, a weekend market getting nudged, then slipping.
The headline risk people are pointing at
When markets nuke like this, thoughts turn to the obvious question, was there a weekend catalyst, or did the market just fall through a thin patch of air?
The timing is hard to ignore because major outlets reported Israeli air strikes in Gaza on Saturday, with at least 30 Palestinians reported killed, including women and children.
That does not automatically mean the strikes caused the move. Crypto is not a clean cause-and-effect market.
Crypto remains the most sensitive risk-on market that trades continuously through the weekend, meaning macro shocks can hit digital assets faster than traditional markets that pause until Monday.
In the absence of circuit breakers and limited liquidity during off-hours, crypto often becomes the first venue where risk is repriced.
Notably, however, while Bitcoin has shown relative resilience, the broader altcoin market has dipped much harder, reflecting a sharper pullback in speculative appetite beyond BTC.
Why weekends keep doing this to people
Crypto is a reflex market. Headlines change mood, mood changes positioning, positioning turns into forced flows and liquidations, and that is exactly what a thin weekend book struggles to absorb.
Weekends are when crypto loses its shock absorbers.
There are fewer traders active, fewer market makers leaning in, less depth sitting on the order book, and more reliance on automated stops and perps flows to do the job of price discovery. When price starts moving, the market can gap in a way that feels unfair, mainly because it is.
Liquidity researchers have been pushing the same point for a while, market cap tells you how big something is, market depth tells you how fragile it is. Kaiko has built a lot of its work around depth based measures that capture how much can trade close to spot without moving price too far. Kaiko
That framework fits what we saw, Bitcoin gets hit, ETH gets hit harder, XRP gets hit hardest, because the pool gets shallower the further down the risk curve you go.
The leverage layer that turns a dip into a drop
Thin liquidity explains the speed. Leverage explains the violence.
Deribit’s weekly analytics from Block Scholes laid out how macro shocks have been bleeding into crypto lately, including a spike in Japanese government bond yields, a break below $90K for BTC and $3,000 for ETH earlier in the week, and a jump in demand for downside protection.
They noted skews in BTC and ETH options falling to around -9%, meaning puts got meaningfully pricier than calls, and ETH funding briefly turned negative as risk sentiment deteriorated.
You do not need that exact chain of events to repeat minute by minute for the takeaway to matter.
The takeaway is that the market has been sitting in a posture where downside hedging is expensive, funding can flip, and the marginal buyer disappears quickly, especially outside peak hours. In that setup, an extra shove can matter.
The missing weekday bid problem
There is also a quieter issue that shows up in the background, the market has been leaning on weekday flows to keep things orderly.
This month, US spot Bitcoin ETFs experienced a whipsaw in flows, erasing early-month gains and underscoring that the institutional bid can cool off quickly.
When weekday flows are already shaky, weekends become more dangerous. You get less natural dip buying, more skittish positioning, and alts tend to pay the price first.
XRP is a good example because it has shown how quickly it can unravel when positioning gets crowded. XRP was hit by a liquidation cascade earlier in January as key levels broke.
That kind of move leaves a memory in the market. Traders start to treat the asset as something that can gap, and once they do, they manage it in a way that can make the next gap easier.
The macro fog that keeps drifting into crypto
Even if the Gaza headline was the spark, it only lands because the backdrop is already combustible.
The broader crypto slide is part of a risk-off environment, where investors rotate toward safer assets and away from speculative exposure.
This is also where geopolitics matters indirectly. When tensions rise, commodities and rates can react, inflation fears can reappear, and risk assets feel it. Financial Times commodity coverage has been tracking oil moving higher on Middle East-related tension risk, and that is the sort of cross-market pulse that can leak into crypto sentiment fast.
Crypto traders do not need to be trading oil to be affected by it. They just need to be trading in a world where inflation expectations and yields still call the shots.
What happens next, three paths that make sense
Here is the part that matters more than the candle, what this move suggests about the next week or two.
One path is a messy bounce. Liquidity returns as the week starts, the panic selling fades, and the market retraces some of the air pocket. Volatility can persist because traders remember how quickly the floor gave way.
Another path is a grind lower. If the macro mood stays defensive, and crypto keeps getting treated like a high beta risk asset, the market can keep searching for a level where buyers feel comfortable again. Investopedia cited Fundstrat’s Sean Farrell, pointing to the mid $70,000s as a possible Bitcoin “value zone” bottom area, which becomes relevant if BTC cannot stabilize soon.
The third path is a weird decoupling. Bitcoin sometimes gets talked about like a geopolitical hedge, and sometimes behaves like one, but the evidence is inconsistent, and it tends to depend on the broader regime, not the headline of the day. If this path shows up, you would see BTC holding up while alts remain heavy, and you would see it confirmed across cross-asset flows, not just on crypto Twitter.
Where that leaves people reading this on a Saturday
Plenty of traders were not even at their desks. That is what makes weekend moves feel personal. You can do everything right during the week, keep your risk tight, stay patient, and still get clipped by a liquidity gap on a Saturday.
Today’s move fits a pattern, thin weekend conditions, altcoin beta, leverage sensitivity, and a news backdrop that makes people quicker to de risk.
Whether the Gaza strikes were the spark or just the moment the market chose to slip, the takeaway is the same, crypto still has a weekend problem, and it shows up fastest in ETH and XRP.
At the time of press 3:22 pm UTC on Jan. 31, 2026, Ethereum is ranked #2 by market cap and the price is down 6.82% over the past 24 hours. Ethereum has a market capitalization of $306.97 billion with a 24-hour trading volume of $35.56 billion. Learn more about Ethereum ›
At the time of press 3:22 pm UTC on Jan. 31, 2026, the total crypto market is valued at at $2.73 trillion with a 24-hour volume of $137.13 billion. Bitcoin dominance is currently at 59.32%. Learn more about the crypto market ›