Cryptocurrency investors are bracing for bumpy ride

Nick was enjoying his Saturday off work in Pennsylvania when he received an unexpected and alarming message: cryptocurrencies, buoyed since Donald Trump's Nov. 5 election win, were in freefall.

The crash immediately wiped out tens of thousands of dollars from his savings.

"I clicked on it and watched it for like a minute just drop straight down," the 28-year-old American construction worker, who asked for anonymity because of sensitivities around investing in crypto assets, told AFP.

"I was like, 'Well, I guess I should stop looking at it now'," he added with a laugh.

Crypto investors like Nick are being buffeted by Trump's vow to make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet" while at the same time upending trade and other policy areas with a raft of executive orders and announcements.

Digital currencies are now seeing sudden fluctuations that are impacting legions of both small and large investors.

Last weekend, cryptos suffered a meltdown after Trump announced impending trade tariffs on U.S. imports from Canada, China and Mexico, prompting investors to turn to safer assets.

The value of Bitcoin, by far the most important crypto which has broken record after record and gained around 50 percent since Trump's election, dropped 6 percent at the height of the crash.

Ether, another blockchain currency considered credible, fell around a quarter.

The falls have been more dramatic for so-called "meme coins", cheap and highly volatile cryptos with little or no economic use, themed around a celebrity or viral internet phenomenon.

In the space of a few hours, Nick lost around $60,000 from the $150,000 he had accumulated over 5 years in his virtual wallets.

Most of his holdings were in Dogecoin, a meme coin backed by billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk.

But Nick remains undeterred and convinced that these highly volatile assets will rebound, just as they did in 2021 when their popularity surged.

"I try to talk about it with my co-workers, but they don't believe in it like I do," he confided.

Larisa Yarovaya of the Southampton Business School in southern England said Bitcoin's record rises were "definitely driven by investment optimism surrounding political endorsements."

She warned that could be "characterised as a bubble", at risk of bursting and spreading beyond crypto, given they are "increasingly interconnected with traditional assets in today's financial landscape."