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.

In a rare legal defeat for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency has formally dropped its fraud case against Richard Schueler, better known as Richard Heart, founder of the crypto projects HEX, PulseChain, and PulseX.

On April 21, the SEC informed the Eastern District Court of New York it would not amend its complaint, effectively bringing the case to a close.

“That brings the case to an end with a complete victory for Mr. Heart,” said David Kirk, partner at Kirk & Ingram LLP, who represented the HEX founder in an email to CoinDesk. “To my knowledge, this is the only SEC enforcement action against a participant in the cryptocurrency industry that was dismissed in its entirety by a federal judge.”

The court had previously dismissed the SEC’s initial complaint in February, citing a lack of jurisdiction.

Judge Carol Bagley Amon noted that Heart’s activities were not clearly targeted at U.S. investors, CoinDesk previously reported, undermining the SEC’s case.

«This is a victory for open-source software, cryptocurrency, and free speech. The SEC actually sued software code itself in this case, claiming it could be an alter ego of a person,» Heart posted on X. «This would have set a terrible precedent and caused perhaps multiple billions of dollars of damage to the vital open source and free software industry that powers most of the Internet and your speech on it.»

Though the regulator was granted an opportunity to amend the complaint, it declined to do so by the extended April 21 deadline.

The SEC had originally filed suit in July 2023, accusing Heart of raising over $1 billion through unregistered securities offerings.

Futures bets against higher crypto prices lost over $500 million in the past 24 hours as a surge higher, buoyed by a possible cooldown of China tariffs by the U.S., led to the largest short liquidations since October.

Bitcoin (BTC) rose from Tuesday’s low of $88,000 to above $93,500 in Asian morning hours, data shows, leading a jump in the broader market with ether (ETH), Cardano’s ADA and dogecoin (DOGE) up 14%. Solana’s SOL and XRP rose 7%, with all tokens in the top hundred by market cap in the green.

Meanwhile, Sui Network’s SUI, UniSwap’s UNI and Near Protocol’s showed strength with gains of as much as 18%. Memecoin mog (MOG) rocketed 30%, continued its tendency to act as a beta bet to ETH’s move.

Nearly $530 million in shorts, or bets on lower prices, booked losses amid a general unwinding of leveraged bets. Data shows that most short liquidations took place on Bybit at $234 million, followed by Binance at $100 million and Gate at nearly $70 million.

The largest single liquidation order happened on Binance, an ETH futures position that was worth over $4.5 million.

Liquidations occur when an exchange forcefully closes a trader’s leveraged position owing to a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial margin. It happens when a trader cannot meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position, that is, when they don’t have sufficient funds to keep the trade open.

An uptick in crypto markes came as Trump said he planned to be “very nice” to China in any trade talks and that tariffs will drop if the two countries can reach a deal — a sign that may temper an ongoing cautious sentiment among traders.

“Fears of an escalating trade war have abated as traders largely see the U.S. and China coming to a trade agreement in the coming weeks,” Jeff Mei, COO at BTSE, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Whether or not this will be temporary remains to be seen.”

“But what the last couple of weeks has shown us is that the likelihood of rate cuts and a depreciating U.S. dollar are high, which explains bitcoin’s surge. If the U.S. dollar is weakening, there aren’t many other currencies to turn to as many other countries may also depreciate their currencies. This could pave the way for bitcoin to become a major store of value,” Mei added.