Bitcoin fell near $113,648 as macro risk spread into weekend crypto trading

Bitcoin traded at about $113,648 on August 2, 2025, down 1.4% over the preceding 24 hours, as a risk-off move spread across major digital assets after a weak U.S. employment report and a sharp August 1 decline in American equities. The price and return were CoinDesk Data's point-in-time reading during the publication's August 2 reporting window, not a daily close or a consolidated price across every exchange.

Ether was quoted at $3,503, down 3.7% over the same 24-hour window. CoinDesk also measured XRP at $2.94, down 1.5%; solana at $164.13, down 2.7%; and dogecoin at $0.1993, down 3.7%. The breadth mattered more than any single token print: the largest cryptoasset and several high-liquidity alternatives were falling together while U.S. cash equity markets were closed for the weekend.

The macro shock carried into continuous crypto trading

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had released its initial July employment estimate at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on August 1. It reported that nonfarm payroll employment increased by 73,000 and that the unemployment rate was 4.2%. More unusually, BLS revised May payroll growth down from 144,000 to 19,000 and June growth down from 147,000 to 14,000. The combined revision removed 258,000 jobs from the two previously reported totals.

Those figures were the contemporaneous official estimates available to traders on August 2, not immutable final measurements. Monthly payroll data can be revised as additional reports arrive and as seasonal factors and annual benchmarks are updated.

Traditional risk markets had already registered the surprise during the August 1 U.S. session. CoinDesk reported the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1.23%, the S&P 500 down 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite down 2.24% at the August 1 close. Bloomberg separately described the S&P 500's 1.6% decline and a 2% drop in the Nasdaq 100. These are different indexes, so the two Nasdaq figures are not interchangeable.

What can—and cannot—be inferred

The timing supports a restrained interpretation: crypto was participating in a broader repricing of growth and risk after the jobs release, while its round-the-clock market extended the move into August 2. It does not prove that the employment report alone caused every token decline. Contemporaneous reporting also identified tariff uncertainty and geopolitical tension as contributors, but the available evidence does not isolate the effect of each factor.

The market response also complicated a familiar narrative around easier monetary policy. Weaker employment could increase expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts, a development sometimes treated as supportive for scarce or non-yielding assets. On August 2, however, concern about weakening growth coincided with falling crypto prices. That is evidence about one market window, not proof of a stable relationship between bitcoin, interest rates and economic data.

No liquidation total is used here. Several contemporaneous outlets published estimates from derivatives-data services, but the reviewed record did not provide a sufficiently transparent, venue-complete methodology to verify how exchanges, instruments and forced-close events were aggregated.

The dated record

The verifiable August 2 development was a broad, measured decline in major cryptoassets, led in institutional significance by bitcoin's move to roughly $113,648 in CoinDesk Data's snapshot. The event mattered because it showed that even after bitcoin's expanding institutional profile, its weekend market could remain tightly exposed to macroeconomic risk sentiment.

This reconstruction does not use later prices or later revisions to characterize the August 2 market. The next questions at that date were whether bitcoin would stabilize when U.S. markets reopened and whether subsequent official data would confirm or alter the labor-market slowdown.