Citigroup said that the wave of the largest liquidations in the history of the crypto market on the night of October 10-11, 2025, proved that bitcoin shows a high correlation with the stock market. This was reported by CoinDesk with reference to an analysts’ report.
“Worsening U.S.-China trade tensions triggered a sharp futures selloff on Friday that spilled into crypto, underscoring its volatility and correlation with equities,” the bank’s report says.
As a reminder, global financial markets suffered a massive collapse after US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on China, which resulted in the liquidation of more than $19 billion of futures positions and a drop in market capitalization of more than 9%.
The fall also caused massive “depreciations” on Binance, where the USDe, BNSOL, and WBETH stablecoins temporarily lost their peg to their nominal value. However, the co-founder of the exchange, Yi He, assured that the company “does not avoid responsibility” for the incident.
After the fall, cryptocurrencies and stock indices partially recovered their losses, and bitcoin was trading at around $111,746 at the time of publication.
Despite the record wave of liquidations, the bank left its forecasts unchanged:
- $133,000 per bitcoin by the end of the year and $181,000 in the 12-month perspective
- $4,500 for Ethereum by the end of the year and $5,400 during the year
Citigroup noted that inflows into bitcoin ETFs have remained stable, likely due to “new, less leveraged investors” who are supporting demand even after the sharp collapse.
“Sustained ETF flows support the base case, while the bear case depends on equity market weakness,” the bank’s analysts said.
In the wake of the liquidations, Crypto.com CEO Chris Marszalek called on regulators to check exchanges that may have restricted access to trading in the heat of the moment and where the largest liquidations took place, and to ensure that anti-money laundering program rules were followed.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said that some centralized exchanges “underreport liquidations by hundreds of times.” According to him, despite thousands of liquidations per second on Binance, only one record is published.