It’s deja vu all over again for bitcoin bulls as Monday’s rally to an all-time high triggered not FOMO, but instead fast retreat. That retreat sped up in a big way in late-morning U.S. action on Friday after trade war tensions between the U.S. and China ratcheted higher.

U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post minutes ago that he’s preparing a «massive increase» in tariffs on Chinese goods in response to China earlier imposing export controls on rare earth metals.

Following the post, bitcoin (BTC) plunged below $119,000 from $122,000. Ether (ETH), solana (SOL) and XRP each joined in the swift decline.

The drop in crypto prices also weighed on stocks tied to the sector. Circle (CRCL) fell over 6%. Robinhood (HOOD), which gets a large portion of its trading activity from crypto, declined 5%.

Coinbase (COIN) also shed 5%, while MicroStrategy (MSTR) slipped about 3%.

The news rippled across traditional markets, too. WTI crude oil dropped nearly 4% below $60, its weakest price since early May. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were 1.6% and 1.3% lower, respectively.

Gold? It rallied more than 1% to back over $4,000 per ounce as the yellow metal once again showed itself, not bitcoin, to be the risk-off asset of choice for investors.

At the current $118,800, bitcoin is lower by about 2% over the past 24 hours and about 6% since hitting a new record above $126,000 just four days ago.

A subsidiary of Dominari Holdings (DOMH), the investment firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., is teaming up with Bitcoin programmability project Hemi to progress its digital asset treasury and exchange-traded fund (ETF) plans.

Broker-dealer Dominari Securities and Hemi, which is backed by veteran Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, teamed up to develop a digital asset treasury and ETF platform, according to an emailed announcement on Friday.

Dominari Holdings is located in the Trump Tower in New York City and counts Eric and Donald Trump Jr. among its investors. They also sit on its board of advisors. In March, the company took a different twist on the method of adopting bitcoin (BTC) as a treasury asset, by committing $2 billion to buy shares in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest spot bitcoin ETF on the market.

The joint venture between Dominari and Hemi will allow institutions to invest in BTC-centric markets via the HEMI token.

As part of the joint venture American Ventures LLC, of which Dominari is a member, made an undisclosed investment in the Hemispheres Foundation, the principal stewards of the Hemi project.

Hemi’s goal is to transform the possibilities for decentralized finance (DeFi) on Bitcoin by unifying it with Ethereum into a single «supernetwork». It raised $15 million in funding to expand its ecosystem in August.

Alongside competitors like Lombard, with liquid staking token LBTC, and BOB, a hybrid chain built atop Bitcoin and Ethereum, Hemi is building infrastructure to make Bitcoin more compatible with DeFi, thus harnessing its $2.4 trillion market cap for the betterment of the wider digital asset industry.

Several recent token launches have seen dramatic drawdowns, bringing to token generation event (TGE) meta into question ahead a number of high profile airdrops.

CAMP, the native token of an AI-focused layer 1 blockchain, is now down by 88% since it was introduced last month, while DoubleZero’s 2Z has lost 60% of its value in just eight days.

There were also notable losses for Anoma’s XAN, down by 60% in a week. XPL, arguably one of the most hyped projects of the year, slumped below its TGE price on Friday amid a wave of negative sentiment around alleged founding team token sale, a claim the company’s founder refuted.

The price action is a stark contrast to last year when projects like HYPE debuted at $6.00 and rose by 400% in the subsequent month.

Why are new tokens failing to impress?

There are several catalysts behind the abject performance of newly-launched tokens; one of which is simply over-farming the hype pre-launch, this means that when a token eventually comes out, users are generally happy to get a return on their investment as opposed to doubling down.

Another reason is tokenomics, XPL’s plight has been attributed to $813 million worth of «ecosystem and growth» tokens that were allegedly sold via market makers, causing pressure on the price and outweighing retail investor demand.

Airdrop season doomed to fail?

Over the coming months crypto users are due to receive airdrops from MetaMask, OpenSea and Monad.

These projects are massive in their respective fields; MetaMask is the most commonly used crypto wallet used by millions, while OpenSea transitioned from being the largest non-fungible token (NFT) exchange to becoming an onchain trading platform, and Monad is a hyped layer 1 blockchain that will airdrop its token next week.

But if 2025’s new token performance is to repeat itself, these respective juggernauts might struggle to maintain a healthy level of demand that outweighs supply, especially in the case of a project like OpenSea where users who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees in 2021 are waiting for a slither back before presumably cashing out.