One Year After 10/10: How Elections Really Move Crypto

One year ago today, the crypto market learned the most expensive lesson of this political cycle, and it had almost nothing to do with a ballot. On the afternoon of October 10, 2025, the sitting US president announced a 100% tariff on Chinese imports. Within hours, roughly $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated, the largest single-day wipeout the asset class had ever recorded. Bitcoin dropped about 14.5%, smaller tokens shed a third of their value in under half an hour, and close to 1.6 million trading accounts were force-closed, according to CNN and CCN. No election night in crypto history produced a move that violent. One policy decision from one man did.

That gap, between what an election does to price and what the person the election installed does to price, is the real subject of every honest conversation about politics and crypto. As the market marks the anniversary of the 10/10 crash trading near $82,400 (Fortune), with a crowded fourth quarter of votes and central-bank meetings dead ahead, it is worth getting the causation straight. The ballot is a low-information event. The exercise of power that follows it is where fortunes are made and unmade. This is a look at how elections actually reach a crypto portfolio in 2026, ranked by what the tape says, not by what a campaign press release says.

The $19 Billion Reminder

The 10/10 crash was not a slow bleed; it was a detonation. The tariff headline hit late in the US trading day, when liquidity was already thin, and the selling fed on itself. Within about 25 minutes, tokens outside Bitcoin and Ethereum had fallen roughly a third. Dogecoin lost more than half its value at the lows, and the president’s own $TRUMP token dropped as much as 63%. On a single venue, the perpetual-futures exchange Hyperliquid, one Ether position worth about $204 million was liquidated in a single print, and total liquidations there topped $1.2 billion; on Binance they ran to roughly $2.4 billion, per CCN. Across the broader market, the same shock erased close to $2 trillion in US equity value.

The scale is what made it historic. The roughly $19 billion in forced liquidations was about nine times larger than any previous single-day total in crypto, a deleveraging event with no precedent. And the cause was not a hack, a stablecoin depeg, or an exchange failure. It was a trade-policy decision, published on social media, by the head of the executive branch. That is the cleanest data point anyone has about how modern politics transmits into crypto prices, and it did not come from a voting booth.

Why the Crash Is the Real Election Story

It is tempting to file the tariff crash under macro, not politics, and move on. That would be a mistake. The 2024 US election did not move crypto much by itself; what it did was hand one person a toolkit. That toolkit, made up of tariffs, executive orders, agency appointments, enforcement priorities, and the central bank the winner gets to reshape, is what has actually driven the tape ever since. The vote was the quiet part. The use of power is the loud part.

Most explainers on this topic hand you a tidy list of five channels through which elections reach the order book: campaign money, prediction markets, legislation, appointments, and monetary policy. The list is fine. The ranking in those explainers is usually backwards. On the evidence of the past year, the ballot-adjacent channels (campaign money, the vote count itself, even the prediction markets that price it) are the weak ones. The power channels (what the winner signs, who the winner appoints, how the winner’s agencies enforce, and the Fed the winner builds) are the strong ones. The 10/10 crash sits at the very top of that ranking: the single largest political shock in crypto history was an executive act, not an election result.

Ranked by how much they actually move price, the channels look like this, strongest first:

• Executive action: tariffs, sanctions, and orders that can hit the tape in minutes, with no vote required.
• Appointments: the SEC, CFTC, and Fed leaders a winner installs, who set enforcement and rates for years.
• The central bank: the interest-rate path that frames every risk asset, downstream of those appointments.
• Legislation: slow, binary, and in 2026 mostly stalled, as CLARITY showed.
• Campaign money and prediction markets: loud during the race, largely priced in by the time it ends.

The Ballot Is a Low-Information Event

Go back to the 2024 template, the one everyone cites as proof that elections are bullish for crypto. Bitcoin traded around $69,000 on election day, November 5, 2024, and popped roughly 10% over the following days as a decisive result removed uncertainty. That is the election-night candle, and it is real. But it is also small and short-lived. The move that actually mattered, the one that pushed Bitcoin through $100,000 for the first time, did not arrive until December 4, 2024, and it landed within hours of the president-elect signaling that he would nominate crypto advocate Paul Atkins to chair the SEC, per Axios and The Block.

Read that sequence carefully, because it is the whole thesis in miniature. The ballot delivered a modest, fast, mean-reverting pop. The durable leg, the one that carried Bitcoin more than 40% higher into year-end, arrived on an appointment signal: a name, a regulatory posture, a change in who would hold the pen. The market was not pricing the vote. It was pricing what the winner would do with the office. Every time an analyst treats the election-night candle as the trade, they are measuring the least important part of the move.

The Pen Beats the Gavel

If the vote is the weak channel, the executive order is the strong one, and 2025 proved it from both directions. On March 6, 2025, the president signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile, directing the government to hold (and not sell) the roughly 200,000 bitcoin it controls through forfeiture, and to pursue budget-neutral ways to acquire more, as CNBC reported. No act of Congress created that reserve. One signature did. It was the most consequential pro-crypto policy of the cycle, and it bypassed the legislature entirely.

Then, seven months later, the same instrument cut the other way. The 10/10 tariff shock was also an executive act, delivered without a vote, a hearing, or a comment period. That symmetry is the point. The president’s pen is the single most powerful lever over crypto prices in the US system right now, capable of adding a strategic bid one quarter and vaporizing $19 billion of leverage the next. Investors who spend election years modeling House and Senate seat counts are often watching the wrong branch of government. The branch that moves crypto fastest does not need 60 votes; it needs a signature.

Appointments are the pen’s quieter cousin, and they matter just as much. The same election that produced the tariff also produced the people who now run crypto policy day to day: an SEC chair who has swapped regulation-by-enforcement for rulemaking, a CFTC that expects a bigger role over digital commodities, and a Fed chair willing to raise rates into a soft labor market. None of those seats were on a ballot, yet each one shapes the tape far longer than any single vote. When investors say an election was bullish or bearish for crypto, what they usually mean, whether they realize it or not, is that they liked or feared the personnel it produced.

CLARITY Died, the Agencies Did Not

The legislative channel, the one the crypto industry spent two years and hundreds of millions of dollars on, is the clearest recent failure. On September 15, 2026, the Senate cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill meant to divide crypto oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, failed 49 to 50, eleven short of the 60 votes needed to advance, per CNBC. It died not over securities law but over a clause restricting the president’s own crypto income, seven weeks before the midterms. Senator Thom Tillis switched his vote to no to preserve a motion to reconsider, which keeps the bill technically alive, but comprehensive market-structure legislation now looks unlikely before 2027.

Here is the part that matters for prices: the legislation stalled and the regime advanced anyway. On October 1, 2026, the SEC proposed a framework for how investment advisers and funds can custody crypto, permitting self-custody under certain conditions and allowing state-chartered trust companies to act as qualified custodians (SEC). Chairman Paul Atkins said the rule would give advisers and funds “a compliant pathway where none existed before.” Both he and CFTC chair Michael Selig have said their agencies will write crypto rules on their own authority, with or without Congress, according to Yahoo Finance. The bill failed; the rulemaking did not. Europe watched the same pattern as MiCA shifted from drafting into active supervision, a transition we covered in MiCA in 2026: From Rulemaking to Enforcement.

The lesson for an election-focused investor is uncomfortable but durable: even when the industry’s money cannot buy a bill, the appointees it helped install keep reshaping the rules through notice-and-comment. The legislative headline is loud and binary; the regulatory reality is quiet and continuous, and it is the quiet one that compounds.

The Fed Is the Election’s Longest Shadow

The longest shadow any election casts over crypto is the central bank it eventually produces. The 2024 result did not just install a president; it set in motion a remade Federal Reserve. By September 2026, a Warsh-led Fed had raised its benchmark rate to a 3.75% to 4.00% range, its first hike since 2023, on a 12 to 0 vote. At the press conference, Chair Kevin Warsh was blunt: “inflation is too high and has been for too long,” he said (PBS NewsHour). A hawkish Fed is a headwind for every risk asset, crypto included, and it is the most direct line from the last election to today’s price.

The near-term calendar sharpens the point. The Fed meets October 27 to 28, and after a soft September jobs report (just 29,000 payrolls added), futures have swung toward a hold; CME FedWatch odds of a quarter-point hike fell to roughly even from about 70% a week earlier (The Block). The meeting that matters more is December 8 to 9, which carries a fresh set of economic projections. That dot plot, not any ballot, is the loudest dated event left in 2026 for crypto, as we argued in Crypto’s FOMC Trade: An October Hold, a December Hike. Notice what is doing the work: an interest-rate path set by appointees, two years after the vote that produced them. The election is still moving crypto in 2026; it is just doing it through the Fed, not the ballot box.

Leverage Turned a Headline Into a Massacre

A headline does not erase $19 billion on its own. Leverage does. The reason a tariff post became the largest liquidation in crypto history is that the market had quietly rebuilt a tower of borrowed positions, concentrated on perpetual-futures venues where traders routinely run many times their collateral. When price gapped down, exchanges began force-closing underwater longs; those forced sells pushed price lower, which tripped the next tier of liquidations, and so on. The mechanics of that doom loop, funding rates, mark prices, and automatic deleveraging, are worth understanding before the next policy shock; we walked through them in How Perp DEXs Work: On-Chain Perpetual Futures in 2026.

The venue detail is instructive. Hyperliquid, an on-chain perp exchange, absorbed a single $204 million Ether liquidation and more than $1.2 billion in total, outpacing some centralized rivals on the day. On-chain perps settle transparently, which meant the cascade was visible block by block, and it also meant the usual questions about who sees your order and who gets filled first became very real that night; we covered that microstructure in Perp DEXs in 2026: Who Front-Runs Your Trade. The takeaway for the political investor is simple. Policy supplies the shock; leverage supplies the magnitude. You cannot control the first, but you can control your exposure to the second, and 10/10 was a brutal lesson in what happens when a crowded, over-levered market meets a single unscheduled headline.

The Q4 2026 Gauntlet

With that framework in hand, look at what is actually on the calendar for the rest of 2026. It is dense, and it mixes ballots with power events. Sorting the two tells you where the risk really sits.

Four of the six are power events, not ballots. The two elections on the list, Brazil’s runoff and the US midterms, are the ones most likely to be noisy and least likely to durably reprice anything. The events that can actually move crypto are the policy dates: the Fed meetings and, above all, the January 10 expiry of the US-China tariff truce, the direct descendant of the shock that defines this anniversary.

Brazil Votes, but the Money Travels Through Licenses

Brazil is the cleanest test of the ballot-versus-power distinction, because it switched off the channel US investors obsess over. The country holds its presidential runoff on October 25, after a first round that upset the polls: Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the imprisoned former president, finished ahead of incumbent Lula with 47.03% to 45.16%, and prediction markets now give him roughly an 85% chance in the second round (Al Jazeera, Rio Times). It is a genuine political earthquake. For crypto, it barely registers, and that is the lesson.

Brazil bans crypto from campaign financing outright, so there is no Fairshake-style war chest, no industry super PAC, no buy-the-candidate channel. The way the election actually reaches a crypto wallet is through regulation and flows. Five days after the runoff, on October 30, Brazil’s central-bank licensing deadline lands: every virtual-asset service provider serving Brazilian users must have filed for authorization, and from that date banks and payment institutions may not process flows for unlicensed exchanges, per Decrypt. In a market that moved close to $319 billion on-chain in a year, that is the event that can genuinely open or close on-ramps. The ballot is theater; the licensing cliff is the trade.

The Midterm Paradox

The US midterms on November 3 are where the money-cannot-buy-it paradox is sharpest. The crypto industry’s super PAC, Fairshake, carried a record war chest of about $193 million into the cycle, with Ripple and Coinbase each giving $25 million and Andreessen Horowitz roughly $24 million, and it has spent across dozens of races, per Yahoo Finance and Axios. That is the largest sectoral political spend in the country. And yet prediction markets give Democrats about a 63% chance of a clean sweep of Congress, with a split outcome next most likely (Polymarket).

Sit with the contradiction. The industry’s money is enormous, and the most likely result is a Congress less friendly to the GOP-authored CLARITY framework and more inclined toward oversight hearings into executive crypto ties than toward passing market-structure law. The money bought access and primary-level influence; it did not buy the 60th Senate vote in September, and it is unlikely to buy a durable legislative majority in November. More to the point of this piece, even a maximally friendly Congress would not out-move the Fed or the president’s pen. The midterms will decide who chairs committees. They will not decide the price of Bitcoin. That is set two blocks away, at the Fed, and one block away, at the White House.

What the Prediction Markets Are Already Pricing

One reason ballots move crypto so little is that the market has usually priced them before the polls open. Prediction venues like Polymarket and Kalshi now post live odds on every event on the Q4 calendar: Flavio Bolsonaro around 85% in Brazil, a Democratic sweep around 63% in the US midterms, a Fed hold as the base case for October. When a result arrives in line with those odds, there is almost nothing left to trade; the information was already in the price. Prediction markets are not a new election channel so much as a mechanism that drains the old one.

That is why the tradeable variable is not the outcome but the surprise, and the September CLARITY vote is the proof. Its failure was widely expected, the odds of passage had collapsed to single digits beforehand, and when the bill duly died, crypto barely flinched. A priced-in event, even a dramatic one, is a non-event for price. The corollary is sell-the-news risk: if the midterms resolve exactly as the market expects, the bigger danger is a crowded, already-positioned book unwinding into the result, not the result itself.

One Year Later, Are the Warning Signs Back?

So where does that leave the market on the anniversary itself? Bitcoin sits near $82,400, about a third below the record near $126,000 it set a year ago, with a market capitalization around $1.33 trillion (Fortune, CoinGecko). The mood is cautious rather than euphoric. The trading desk QCP Capital expects Bitcoin to spend the fourth quarter roughly between $80,000 and $90,000, flagging the $80,000 to $82,000 zone as a place to add and the high $80,000s as a place to trim if ETF inflows do not pick up; its bull case above $100,000 leans on steady ETF demand and a Fed pause, while its bear case below $70,000 turns on a fresh oil or policy shock, per The Block.

Read against the 10/10 template, the warning signs are familiar but not yet flashing red. Leverage has rebuilt, but open interest and funding sit below the extremes of a year ago. The real analog is not the chart; it is the calendar. The condition that let one tariff post cause a historic cascade, an over-levered market colliding with an unscheduled executive decision, is exactly what the January 10 tariff-truce expiry sets up again. The US-China truce was extended through that date during Xi Jinping’s Washington visit (NBC News); if it lapses or is threatened, the market will get its answer about whether it learned anything. The one date on the forward calendar that rhymes with last October is not an election. It is a policy cliff.

Concretely, the dashboard to watch is short. Perpetual-futures funding and open interest tell you how much leverage has rebuilt, and therefore how much fuel is lying around for the next headline. The US-China headlines tell you whether the January truce is drifting toward extension or rupture. And the Fed’s language around October 28 and December 9 tells you how much patience risk assets will be granted. None of those three gauges is an election result, and all three will matter more to a crypto balance sheet over the next 90 days than who wins any single Senate seat.

How to Trade a Policy-Driven Tape

If the thesis is right, the practical implications are unglamorous and durable. Watch the branch of government that signs things, not the one that counts votes. The lasting moves in this cycle have arrived weeks after elections, through appointments and rulemaking, not on election night, so the patient position has beaten the reactive one. And respect leverage around unscheduled policy risk: 10/10 was a Friday-into-weekend trap that caught traders running size into a quiet tape. Binary policy dates are precisely when to carry less, not more.

None of this means elections are irrelevant. They are the upstream event that selects the people who will later hold the pen, the gavel, and the Fed chair. But the transmission runs through those people and their decisions, on a lag, not through the ballot itself. The investor who internalizes that stops trading the vote and starts trading the governance, which is both less exciting and considerably more durable.

The through-line of this anniversary is not pessimism about elections; it is precision about them. A vote is a scheduling event that tells you when power will change hands and into whose. The repricing that matters arrives afterward, in the executive orders, the agency rules, the enforcement choices, and the rate decisions that follow. Last October proved the point in the most violent way available: a single policy sentence did what no ballot has ever done to crypto. The next time a headline insists an election will make or break the market, remember the date on the calendar that actually did, and remember that it had no candidates on it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do elections actually affect crypto prices?

Less than most people assume, and not directly. An election result tends to produce a quick, mean-reverting move that then fades. The durable repricing comes later, through what the winner does with power: executive orders, agency appointments, enforcement priorities, and the central bank they shape. In this cycle, the largest political move in crypto history was not a vote at all; it was the October 10, 2025 tariff decision that liquidated about $19 billion in a single day.

What caused the October 10, 2025 crypto crash?

A trade-policy announcement. The US president said he would impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, and an over-levered market cascaded: roughly $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated, about 1.6 million accounts were closed, and Bitcoin fell around 14.5%, the largest single-day liquidation crypto has ever seen. The shock supplied the trigger; concentrated leverage on perpetual-futures venues supplied the magnitude.

Will the 2026 US midterms move Bitcoin?

Probably not much, and mostly through sentiment rather than fundamentals. Prediction markets already give Democrats about a 63% chance of sweeping Congress, so the likely outcome is largely priced in. A new Congress would shape oversight and the odds of future legislation, but it would not set the near-term price of Bitcoin. That job belongs to the Fed and to executive policy, both of which move faster than any bill.

Is the CLARITY Act dead?

Effectively stalled, not formally dead. The Senate cloture vote failed 49 to 50 on September 15, 2026, and a senator preserved a motion to reconsider, so the bill is technically still callable. Analysts and prediction markets put the odds of passage in 2026 in the single digits, and a comprehensive market-structure law now looks unlikely before 2027. In the meantime, the SEC and CFTC are building an interim regime through rulemaking under existing authority.

What is the biggest crypto risk in the fourth quarter of 2026?

The policy calendar, not the elections. The two votes, Brazil’s October 25 runoff and the US November 3 midterms, are largely priced in. The events that can actually reprice crypto are the Federal Reserve’s October 28 and December 8 to 9 meetings and, most of all, the January 10, 2027 expiry of the US-China tariff truce, the direct echo of the shock that caused last year’s record crash.

Priya Reddy covers markets, macro, and crypto policy for HOGE Wire.