Crypto traders woke up on Friday staring at screens that looked like a battlefield. Red everywhere. And at the center of the wreckage? Ethereum dragging nearly every altcoin in existence down with it like an anchor thrown off a cliff.
On June 5, ETH shed roughly 10% in a single day, sliding from just above $1,700 to $1,545. That’s a price level nobody had seen since April 2025. Zoom out to the past week, and the picture gets worse Ethereum is now down nearly 22% over seven days, despite still showing positive numbers for the year. Cold comfort for the traders who rode it down.
The damage didn’t stop at price charts.
About $468 million in positions got liquidated. $408 million of which were long positions. That’s real money. Real people watching months of gains disappear in hours.
BNB, XRP, and Solana fell too, though they managed to stay within single-digit losses. But here’s the thing even their relative stability wasn’t enough to hold the broader market together. Total altcoin capitalization fell below $880 billion, a number that signals something deeper than a bad day.
This Isn’t a Random Crash . The Cracks Have Been Showing for Months
Here’s what the headlines won’t tell you: this wasn’t a surprise. The altcoin market has been sick for a while.
Since October 2025, altcoins have been trading in a severely degraded technical zone. According to data from analyst Darkfost, 83% of altcoins listed on Binance are sitting below their 200-day moving average, the line that separates a healthy trend from a market that’s quietly dying.
Darkfost put it plainly: the situation has been getting worse for altcoins since December 2024, with very few signs of a genuine recovery in sight.
TOTAL3 the index tracking altcoins without Ethereum is now hovering around $670 billion. That represents roughly $520 billion wiped out since the cycle’s peak.
Half a trillion dollars. Gone.
The World Outside Crypto Isn’t Helping.
It’s not just an internal crypto problem. Bitcoin fell close to 4%, while the S&P 500 dropped 2.6% and the Nasdaq slid 4.7%. AI and semiconductor stocks took a hard hit, and that macro fear spilled straight into crypto. When traditional markets get nervous, the first thing people cut loose is speculative assets and crypto sits right at the top of that list.
When Bitcoin itself touches lows not seen since 2024, you know the whole body is under stress, not just one limb.
Zcash Got Hit by a Ghost From 2022
Among the casualties, Zcash had arguably the worst day of all and for a completely different reason.
ZEC dropped more than 40%, crashing from around $540 to $264.80. The collapse was tied to the discovery of an old flaw in Zcash’s Orchard privacy pool a vulnerability that had been sitting there since 2022. An emergency patch was rolled out, but the damage was already priced in. Monero quietly reclaimed the number one spot among privacy coins while ZEC was on fire.
Is Anyone Still Looking for an Exit or an Entry?
Interestingly, not everyone is just watching and panicking. Some investors are still moving pieces around the board. David Hoffman reportedly exited Ethereum to reposition into ZEC, HYPE, NEAR, VVV, and LIT a sign that even in a bloodbath, some people are hunting for the next surviving theme rather than heading for the exit.
Whether that’s courage or overconfidence, only the next few weeks will tell.
What’s clear right now is this: the altcoin market isn’t just having a rough patch. It’s been in quiet deterioration since late 2024, and Ethereum’s week just ripped the curtain off that reality. The question everyone’s sitting with is simple: where’s the floor?
Nobody has that answer yet.
This is Not investment advice. Do your own research.
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