Cryptocurrency firms felt the heat from US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff rollout this week as market turbulence sent share prices tumbling and foiled initial public offering (IPO) plans. 

From exchanges to Bitcoin (BTC) miners, crypto stocks suffered as much, if not more, than shares of other companies — despite the industry’s warm relationship with the US president. 

On April 2, Trump announced he was placing tariffs of at least 10% on practically all imports into the United States and adding additional “reciprocal” tariffs on some 57 countries. 

Since then, major US stock indices — including the S&P 500 and Nasdaq — tumbled by roughly 10% as traders braced for a looming trade war. 

Related: Bitcoin ‘decouples,’ stocks lose $3.5T amid Trump tariff war and Fed warning of ‘higher inflation’

Sharp selloffs

Crypto exchange Coinbase — a prominent ally of Trump during the November US elections — experienced a similarly severe sell-off, with its stock price dropping by roughly 12% during the same period, according to data from Google Finance.

Bitcoin miners are also taking a hit. The CoinShares Crypto Miners ETF (WGMI) — which tracks a diverse basket of Bitcoin mining stocks — has lost roughly 13% of its value since immediately prior to Trump’s April 2 announcement, according to data from Morningstar. 

Even Strategy, one of the best-performing stocks of 2024, wasn’t immune. Its share price has fallen by around 6% on the news, Google Finance data showed.

According to Reuters, investment bank JPMorgan has raised its estimated odds of a global economic recession in 2025 to 60% from 40% previously. 

“Disruptive U.S. policies have been recognized as the biggest risk to the global outlook all year,” JP Morgan reportedly said.

“The effect … is likely to be magnified through (tariff) retaliation, a slide in U.S. business sentiment and supply-chain disruptions.”

IPO delays

The impact of US tariffs hasn’t been limited to stock price volatility. Stablecoin issuer Circle has reportedly paused plans for a 2025 IPO, citing market turbulence. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, Circle is “waiting anxiously” before taking further steps after filing to take the company public on April 1. 

It is among several companies — including fintech Klarna and ticketing service StubHub — reportedly considering altering or shelving IPO plans. 

One exception may be Bitcoin itself, which some analysts say is finally “decoupling” from the broader market.

Bitcoin’s spot price has held above $82,000 this week, even as US equities markets collapsed.

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First Trust Advisors has launched two Bitcoin (BTC) strategy exchange-traded funds (ETFs) designed to provide investors with Bitcoin exposure while capping losses and earning yield, the asset manager said. 

The move comes amid an outpouring of funds seeking to enhance Bitcoin’s appeal to traditional investors by offering tailored exposure to the cryptocurrency’s performance.

The FT Vest Bitcoin Strategy Floor15 ETF (BFAP) is designed to track Bitcoin’s performance up to a capped upside while limiting drawdown risk to approximately 15%, First Trust said in an announcement.

“Over the past few years, investors have shown a remarkably strong appetite for bitcoin-linked ETFs, but the potential for sharp drawdowns has kept many on the sidelines,” Ryan Issakainen, an ETF strategist at First Trust, said in a statement.

The FT Vest Bitcoin Strategy & Target Income ETF (DFII) is an actively managed fund aiming to offer partial Bitcoin exposure while generating a yield that beats short-dated US Treasurys by at least 15%, according to the asset manager. 

The DFII fund “will seek to take advantage of bitcoin’s high volatility to generate income by selling call options,” Issakainen said. The BFAP fund also uses financial derivatives to hedge downside risk. 

Options are contracts granting the right to buy or sell — “call” or “put,” in trader parlance — an underlying asset at a certain price.

Related: Trump-linked Strive files for ‘Bitcoin Bond’ ETF

Structured Bitcoin funds

Launched in January 2024, Bitcoin ETFs emerged as one of last year’s hottest investment products. 

As of April 4, spot BTC ETFs collectively manage approximately $93 billion in assets, according to data from Bitbo. 

Other types of ETFs designed to offer tailored exposure to Bitcoin’s performance are also gaining popularity. 

On April 2, Grayscale — a cryptocurrency-focused asset manager — launched two Bitcoin strategy ETFs. Like First Trust’s ETFs, they use financial derivatives to optimize for downside risk management and income generation. 

In March, asset manager Bitwise launched an ETF holding stocks of companies with large Bitcoin treasuries. 

Spot BTC ETFs saw nearly $100 million in outflows on April 3 amid the heightened market volatility following US President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement of sweeping tariffs on April 2. 

Magazine: Bitcoin ATH sooner than expected? XRP may drop 40%, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 23 – 29

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EigenLayer plans to start “slashing” restakers on April 17, resulting in the Ethereum restaking protocol’s “first feature-complete iteration,” it said in an April 2 announcement. 

Implementing slashing will mark EigenLayer’s final step toward establishing the protocol as “infrastructure for a new generation of verifiable apps and services built on the Verifiable Cloud,” it said in a post on the X platform.

In 2024, EigenLayer started distributing rewards — including emissions of its native EIGEN token — to incentivize restakers. However, slashing has so far been limited to EigenLayer’s testnets.

Once slashing is live, node operators and restakers will be able to voluntarily “opt-in,” resulting in a gradual transition for users, EigenLayer said in a blog post.

Related: EigenLayer eyes consumer adoption post EIGEN unlock, founder says

Gradual roll-out

Launched in 2023, EigenLayer secures third-party protocols — dubbed actively validated services (AVSs) — against a pool of “restaked” cryptocurrencies used as collateral. 

Restaking involves taking a token that has already been staked — posted as collateral with a validator in exchange for rewards — and using it to secure other protocols simultaneously. 

Slashing is the primary method for securing proof-of-stake protocols — including Ethereum as well as “restaking” protocols such as EigenLayer — and involves penalizing a network’s node operators for poor performance or misbehavior.

“If Operators do not meet the conditions set, the AVS may penalize them. But, if the Operator runs the service successfully, AVSs can reward the Operator’s performance and incentivize specific activity,” EigenLayer said in an April 3 blog post. 

This “allows for a free marketplace where Operators can earn rewards for their work and AVSs can launch verifiable services,” the post said. 

Growing ecosystem

Upward of 30 AVSs are already live on EigenLayer’s mainnet, and dozens more are being developed.

They include EigenDA — run by EigenLayer developer Eigen Labs — and ARPA Network, a protocol specializing in trustless randomization.

In October, EigenLayer unlocked its native token, EIGEN. It is designed as a more flexible option for securing consensus-based protocols than other proof-of-stake tokens, such as Ether, according to EigenLayer.

EigenLayer is prioritizing onboarding crypto-native apps in segments such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming before expanding beyond Web3, founder Sreeram Kannan told Cointelegraph in October. 

“We’re starting with the inside-out approach, focusing on high-throughput consumer apps like DeFi and gaming, but once we grow a little bigger and have critical mass, we’ll go outside and start targeting broader consumer markets,” Kannan said.

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Cango, a publicly traded Chinese conglomerate, has agreed to sell its legacy China operations to an entity associated with peer Bitmain in a bid to go all-in on Bitcoin (BTC) mining, according to a report by The Miner Mag. 

Cango agreed to sell its legacy Chinese auto financing business to Ursalpha Digital Limited in a $352 million deal, according to the report.

 Additionally, Bitmain is reportedly transferring 32 exahashes per second (EH/s) to Cango. The deal effectively brings Bitmain’s mining assets to the public market, The Miner Mag said.

Exahashes measure a miner’s contribution to the Bitcoin network’s hashrate, the total computing power securing the network.

The Miner Mag said Ursalpha Digital Limited has the same corporate address and founding director as Antalpha, an entity ultimately controlled by the chairman of Bitcoin miner Bitmain. 

Related: Analysts eye Bitcoin miners’ AI, chip sales ahead of Q4 earnings

Trump-family connection

Bitmain has experienced US scrutiny after the country blacklisted its artificial intelligence affiliate Sopghgo, Bloomberg reported. 

According to Bloomberg, Bitmain has a working relationship with American Bitcoin, a Trump-family-affiliated mining entity created in March as part of a deal with Hut 8, a provider of power and computing infrastructure. 

On March 31, Hut 8 bought a majority ownership interest in American Bitcoin (formerly American Data Centers), whose founders include US President Donald Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. 

Hut 8 has transferred its Bitcoin mining equipment to American Bitcoin, which is reportedly mulling an initial public offering (IPO), according to Bloomberg. 

The companies said that American Bitcoin will focus on crypto mining, while Hut 8 targets data center infrastructure for applications such as high-performance computing. 

In 2025, Bitcoin mining stocks have struggled amid declining cryptocurrency prices and pressure on business models caused by the Bitcoin network’s April halving, according to a JPMorgan research note shared with Cointelegraph.

Every four years, the amount of BTC mined per “block” — a bundle of transaction data stored on the chain — is cut in half. April’s halving slashed mining rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

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