Cardano’s ADA, Ether lead market Gains as Bitcoin ‘decoupling’ continues

Cardano’s ADA and ether (ETH) zoomed more than 14% in the past 24 hours, leading gains among major cryptocurrencies, as bitcoin (BTC) crossed $93,500 late Tuesday on renewed hopes of a tempered approach to the tariff wars.

BTC jumped 6.5%, with Solana’s SOL, XRP and BNB Chain’s BNB all adding 8%. Major memecoins dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) climbed more than 11%, with Sui Network’s SUI surging 30% to lead gains among midcaps.

Overall market capitalization rose 4.4% to $3.03 trillion. The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20) advanced 5%, indicative of the average jump among majors.

The gains came after President Donald Trump said Tuesday he will substantially reduce his tariffs on China while also clarifying that he would not attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

While the tone shift gave investors much-needed relief, it also raised concern over the administration's ability to maintain consistency and reliability, which has fueled the recent increases in the price of gold and U.S. Treasury yields, traders said.

“Bitcoin's narrative as a 'store of value' seems to be overtaking its correlation with US markets, as BTC pumped during both negative and positive news related to Trump's tariffs and Powell comments, showcasing its potential to reach new all-time highs,” Nick Ruck, director at LVRG Research, said in a Telegram message.

Bitcoin's resilience relative to U.S. equities has strengthened its store-of-value narrative among some market observers.

“There is strong potential for bitcoin to lose its long-running correlation with US equities and may now turn to its digital gold narrative as the price of gold has reached an all-time high,” Jupiter Zheng, partner of research at HashKey Capital, said in an email. “We remain positive that investors will evaluate BTC as a long-term store of value.”

Some market watchers said that gold's advance and the decoupling of bitcoin from equities seems to be concentrated in Asian morning hours.

“Data shows that gold has been deriving most of its rally during the Asian hours, suggesting possible central bank and official flows getting out of USD into alternative safe havens,” said Augustine Fan, head of insights at SignalPlus. “The USD decoupling does seem to be more pronounced than previous episodes.

“One of the possible ramifications of the US decoupling is a revisit to the long-term BTC bull case as a store of value. While we have also been critiquing BTC as a levered Nasdaq proxy over the past year, it has finally started to show some signs of its own decoupling away from equity markets,” Fan said.