Bitcoin fell 6.39% as the post-reserve selloff widened

Bitcoin’s BTC-USD spot market fell 6.39% on Coinbase during March 9, 2025, extending a broad cryptocurrency retreat two days after the White House’s first crypto summit and three days after President Donald Trump established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Coinbase’s daily candle, covering 00:00 through 24:00 UTC, opened at $86,206.64 and closed at $80,699.17. The percentage change is Coinburn’s calculation from those two venue-specific prices. Bitcoin traded as low as $80,000 and as high as $86,480 within that window.

A Reuters snapshot taken before the UTC close placed bitcoin at approximately $81,555 at 22:16 GMT, down 5.47% under Reuters’ measurement. The difference from Coinbase’s final 6.39% decline reflects dissimilar observation times and possibly different price inputs; the figures should not be treated as contradictory or interchangeable.

Selling spread beyond bitcoin

The March 9 move was not confined to the largest cryptocurrency. On Coinbase, ETH-USD opened at $2,203.03 and closed at $2,020.02, an 8.31% decline across the same UTC window. Ether’s session low was $1,988.30.

ADA-USD declined 10.41%, from $0.8050 to $0.7212, while DOGE-USD fell 12.60%, from $0.19221 to $0.16800. Those percentages are also Coinburn calculations using Coinbase’s opening and closing trades for each one-day candle.

Contemporaneous reporting showed the same direction and breadth. At 4:24 p.m. Eastern, The Block reported dogecoin near $0.17 and down almost 12%, cardano near $0.74 and down 10%, and bitcoin below $83,000. Reuters recorded ether at $2,024.68 at 22:22 GMT, down 5.4% under its snapshot methodology.

These measurements establish a broad selloff, but not a universal global closing price. Cryptocurrency trades continuously across venues, and Coinbase’s candle represents transactions on one exchange. Coinbase also warns that its historical candle data can be incomplete when an interval contains no trades, although that limitation is unlikely to affect these actively traded pairs.

The reserve order did not promise immediate buying

The institutional backdrop made the decline notable. The March 6 executive order created a reserve capitalized with bitcoin already owned by the government through completed forfeitures. It directed the Treasury and Commerce secretaries to develop possible budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided those strategies imposed no incremental taxpayer costs.

The order therefore did not announce an immediate open-market purchase, appropriate acquisition money or specify a buying schedule. The March 9 decline followed the order, but chronology alone cannot establish that disappointment over its terms caused the selling. The Block connected the retreat with both declining expectations around the reserve and a wider equity-market reaction to tariff policy.

Macroeconomic uncertainty also intensified on March 9. In an interview aired that day, Trump declined to predict whether his tariff program could produce a recession and described the economy as undergoing a transition. Because U.S. cash equity markets were closed on Sunday, cryptocurrency provided a continuously traded measure of risk sentiment before the next stock-market session. That timing supports a macro-risk interpretation, but it still does not isolate a single catalyst.

What the March 9 record supports

The defensible conclusion is limited: bitcoin, ether and prominent altcoins suffered a synchronized decline on March 9, with losses generally increasing further down the risk spectrum. The session showed that creation of a federal bitcoin reserve had not eliminated crypto’s sensitivity to policy expectations, economic uncertainty or weekend selling.

It did not demonstrate that the reserve policy had failed, that the government would never acquire additional bitcoin, or that one political statement mechanically produced the price move. Those questions required evidence beyond the March 9 market record.