Many coins, one market
Holding several coins feels like spreading risk. In a sell-off it mostly isn’t. The same people buy and sell most crypto assets on the same exchanges, often with borrowed money, and when fear arrives it arrives everywhere at once.
There is a second reason. When people need cash in a hurry they sell whatever has buyers, so a coin with no bad news of its own gets sold to pay for trouble somewhere else.
The two largest networks show how closely prices fall together. On Coinbase’s daily prices, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, bitcoin fell 5 percent or more in a day on 23 days in 2022.
Ether fell on every one of those 23 days, and by 5 percent or more on 21 of them.
Over the whole of 2022 the two moved in the same direction on 85 percent of days; in 2026, to the end of October, on 88 percent. Smaller tokens can fall further. In the crash of October 2025, covered below, several tokens lost more than 75 percent within minutes.
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