The crypto market rebounded Monday evening as Bitcoin briefly surpassed $102,000, following weekend volatility sparked by AI firm DeepSeek's breakthrough announcements.
Bitcoin is hovering above $102,000, though it's still down about 6.5% from January 20’s all-time high, near $109,000, CoinGecko data shows.
A "noticeable recovery" can be seen "as investors seem to be reallocating to their favorite crypto assets" in a trend that's "driven by optimism about the long-term impact of AI democratization on the market," Dominick John, an analyst at Kronos Research, told Decrypt.
Seminal meme crypto Dogecoin, which, on Monday, suffered its worst daily performance since the year began, is up 2.6% to $0.33, while other top performers include BNB and XRP—up 3.6% and 3.2%, respectively.
The recovery coincides with Wall Street analysts offering measured perspectives on DeepSeek's impact, countering initial market panic that sparked an $860 million crypto liquidation cascade and rattled U.S. tech stocks.
"Is DeepSeek doomsday for AI buildouts? We don't think so," Bernstein semiconductor analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in an investor note. "DeepSeek did not build OpenAI for $5 million," she said, suggesting that market reaction to the Chinese startup's emergence was "overblown."
On the other hand, analysts from Morgan Stanley noted DeepSeek demonstrates "an alternative path to efficient model training" rather than a threat to established players.
DeepSeek's latest release of Janus-Pro-7B, an open-source AI image generation model focusing on multimodal capabilities, furthers market confidence.
NVIDIA bore the brunt of DeepSeek’s recent popularity on Monday, wiping $600 billion from its market cap—the largest single-day loss in history—triggering a $1 trillion wipeout in the U.S. tech sector.
The tech giant attempted to assuage investor concerns via an ambiguous response to the Kobeissi Letter on Monday.
"DeepSeek's work shows how new models can be created, leveraging widely available models and compute that is fully export control compliant," a spokesperson from NVIDIA reportedly said.
President Trump chimes in
President Donald Trump, who has used rhetoric against China on trade matters, has softened his stance on the country, saying last week at the Roosevelt Room that his administration was looking at "a tariff of 10% on China.”
This is lower than the 60% he promised on the campaign trail.
"The Chinese LLM poses a potential threat to US equity markets by disrupting US AI dominance with their cost efficiency and groundbreaking open-source technology," analysts from QCP Capital wrote in a report Monday.
Speaking earlier today during a House Republican conference meeting held in Miami, President Trump chimed in on the DeepSeek concerns.
"The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company should be a wakeup call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win," Trump said. "[...] that's good because you don't have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset."
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair