Cryptocurrency Market Takes a Tumble
The cryptocurrency sector experienced significant downturn on January 31. Bitcoin (BTC) dropped below $80,000, marking a notable decline.
At that moment, Bitcoin was trading at around $77,934.46, down about 7% over the past day. This was the lowest it’s been since April 2025, which was right after President Trump’s “Emancipation Day” tariffs triggered a market shift.
The overall market mirrored Bitcoin’s struggles, with the total cryptocurrency market cap declining over 7.9% to approximately $2.7 trillion within that time frame.
In light of these losses, many traders hurried to exit the market as positions were liquidated. According to CoinGlass, around $2.51 billion in cryptocurrency positions were liquidated in just 24 hours, with most of that being long positions at about $2.41 billion, while short positions amounted to approximately $105.19 million.
Compounding the volatility, the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, Step Finance, reported that several of its treasury and fee wallets had been breached.
The platform describes itself as “Solana’s front page.” In a post on X, the team announced:
“Earlier today, several of our treasury wallets were compromised by a sophisticated attacker during business hours in the Asia Pacific region. We took immediate remedial action and are working closely with top security experts. We have notified the relevant authorities.”
On-chain data indicated that approximately 261,854 Solana (SOL) were unstaked and transferred during this breach, totaling around $26 million at current market prices.
As for Solana (SOL), it also faced a sharp drop, falling 13.5% overnight to $101.64 as of the latest updates.
Currently, Step Finance has not confirmed the exact cause of the breach or whether users’ funds were compromised beyond the financial assets.
Step Finance, established in 2021, aggregates liquidity pool (LP) tokens, yield farms, and other positions from nearly all Solana-based protocols into a single dashboard.
The platform also manages SolanaFloor, a news outlet focused on Solana, and hosts the annual Solana Crossroads event.
In December 2024, it took over early-stage startup Moose Capital, which has now been rebranded as Remora Markets, successfully introducing tokenized stock trading of major companies like Nvidia and Tesla to the Solana ecosystem.
On November 5, Step Group announced the shutdown of its main Step Finance dashboard to direct efforts towards SolanaFloor and the Remora trading platform.
While the platform previously boasted around 300,000 monthly users, it found it challenging to sustain operations amidst declining DeFi activity across Solana and other networks, leading to difficulties in covering its data infrastructure costs.
