Bitcoin Sheds $2,097 in Ten Minutes, Now at $73,510

Bitcoin fell from $75,607 to $73,510 in ten minutes on Sunday evening, its lowest level since August 21, then settled near $74,184 by Monday morning. The worst minute hit at 21:55 UTC — 4:55 p.m. in New York — when BTC dropped 1.9% on Binance. Traders pointed at Nvidia first.

CNBC reported at 3:12 p.m. Eastern that Nvidia's board had opened an independent investigation into CEO Jensen Huang's relationship with a woman U.S. intelligence agencies believe was passing information to Beijing — speculation for now. Huang admitted the affair in an email to staff. Lookonchain flagged that a whale then opened a 10x short on 30,000 NVDA, worth $5.44 million, on Hyperliquid.

The clock though doesn't fit a straight reaction. Bitcoin sat at $75,880 the minute CNBC published, and 90 minutes later it was $75,607 — down just 0.4%. Then selling exploded in Ethereum first: ETH fell 6.9%, from $2,213 to $2,060, between 21:50 and 21:55 UTC, while Bitcoin lost 2.4% over those same five minutes. That's the shape of a liquidation cascade, where forced closes knock out the next batch of leveraged longs. Watcher.Guru put $1 billion liquidated from crypto in ten minutes, with BTC under $74,000, ETH under $2,125, XRP under $1.10 and SOL under $90.

Thin weekend books did the rest of the damage. Binance averages about $24 million of BTC volume in a typical weekend hour, half the $48 million of a weekday hour. In the past year there were 29 hours where Bitcoin fell at least 2.5% below the hour's open, and Sunday's move came on $180 million of volume — the second-lowest of the 29 and roughly half the $366 million median. The busiest minute alone, 21:55 UTC, traded $75 million, about triple a full weekend hour. Quiet weekends don't trigger more crashes — only 6 of those 29 drops landed on a Saturday or Sunday, slightly fewer than the share of all hours that fall on weekends. They just make each dollar of selling move the price further. Futures flows aren't counted in that tally.

Nvidia still framed the mood. The biggest AI stock has dragged Bitcoin along for weeks, and Thursday's chip-stock selloff is what pushed BTC under its 200-day average. With equities closed, crypto was the only open market for the headline. Secretary of State Marco Rubio added to it, calling Iran's demands