I remember Oct. 10, 2025 with uncomfortable clarity.
Donald Trump had posted on Truth Social, threatening to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports. Markets reacted instantly and violently.
And it wasn't just money that was lost. Some even lost their lives.
What followed became one of the darkest days in crypto history.
Related: Crypto markets violently crash after Trump's latest tariffs
A single post, a historic wipeout
Within hours, more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were wiped out, marking the largest single-day liquidation event ever for the industry.
Bitcoin took the hardest hit .
As the most liquid asset in the market, it became the pressure valve for forced selling.
Prices collapsed from their highs, and months later, the market is still struggling to regain footing.
Popular on TheStreet Roundtable:
Cathie Wood: This wasn't 'just another dip'
In a recent interview , ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood revisited the events of Oct. 10 and added an important detail.
Speaking to Fox Business, Wood said the crypto ecosystem has spent the past 2-3 months dealing with the aftershocks of what she described as a forced deleveraging event. According to her estimates, the unwind wiped out roughly $28 billion across the system.
More notably, Wood linked the chaos to a software glitch at Binance.
"October 10 th was, what in the crypto world...is the flash crash associated with a software glitch on Binance that deleveraged the system,"she said.
It's important to note that back in October, Binance shared a statement on the crash. It said at the time that the October sell-off was driven by broader market conditions, not by failures on its platform.
The exchange added that its core systems remained operational and that it paid roughly $283 million in compensation to users affected by de-pegging and related issues, with additional payouts planned for verified losses.
Binance added that the most severe technical glitches and de-pegging events occurred after the market had already bottomed.
The unusually sharp price drops seen in some spot trading pairs, it said, were caused by legacy limit orders, thin liquidity, and interface display issues and not by assets trading at true zero values.
Why Bitcoin absorbed the brunt of deleveraging
Bitcoin, Wood said, bore the brunt of the crash because "it is the most liquid crypto asset." When leverage unwinds at scale, the deepest markets absorb the damage first.
While she believes the worst of the deleveraging phase is now over, Wood emphasized that infrastructure reliability remains a key hurdle for long-term institutional adoption, including for products like ARK's spot Bitcoin ETF (ARKB).
"Now, the only thing I think investors are worried about, especially instituitional investors who understand that they must examine this as a new asset class, the leader in a new asset class...They are looking at the four year cycle."
Wood added that institutional investors are primarily focused on whether Bitcoin has completed the downside phase of its four-year cycle. And while prices may consolidate around the $80,000–$90,000 range in the near term, she believes the worst is largely behind and the next upward phase is approaching.
The total crypto market capitalization has declined 21.4% from $4.2 trillion on Oct. 10 to $3.3 trillion at the time of writing.
TheStreet Roundtable reached out to Binance for a comment and had not received a response by the time of publication.
Related: Cathie Wood makes her first crypto trade of 2026
Industry fractures come into view
Wood wasn't alone in sounding the alarm.
In a separate post on X, OKX founder and CEO Star Xu said the "10/10 incident" had been widely underestimated in terms of its long-term impact. He described it as an event that caused "real and lasting damage" to the crypto ecosystem.
Xu said,
"Some chose to pursue short-term gains—repeatedly launching Ponzi-like schemes, amplifying a handful of "get-rich-quick" narratives, and directly or indirectly manipulating the prices of low-quality tokens, drawing millions of users into assets closely tied to them."
Most troubling, Xu said, is how criticism often gets buried, not through transparency or accountability, but through narrative control and coordinated influencer campaigns.
CZ hits back at FUD
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) pushed back on the broader criticism, responding to what he called "twisted FUD" around his long-standing "buy and hold" comments.
FUD is a common crypto acronym for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt."
CZ clarified that the strategy was never meant to apply blindly across all tokens.
"If you 'buy and hold' all crypto ever created, you know how your portfolio will perform,"he wrote. " In any industry, the majority of projects will fail. The few successes will perform exponentially."
Related: Machi Big Brother gets liquidated 145 times since Oct. 11 crypto crash
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Jan 28, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
