What to Do During a Crypto Crash

By Gurjeet Singh, developer of CoinPriceAlert · Published 14 August 2026 · 3 min read

First, find out what kind of crash it is

Check whether equities and the dollar moved too. If the whole risk complex is selling, this is macro and crypto is simply the highest-beta expression of it. Then check open interest: if it collapsed alongside price, this is a leverage flush — a mechanical event with no informational content about any asset.

The third case is a genuine crypto event: an exchange failure, a major exploit, a regulatory action. Only this one is a reason to reconsider positions, and it is the least common of the three.

Then, do considerably less than you want to

The strong urge during a crash is to do something, and the available somethings are mostly bad. Selling into a mechanical flush realises a loss at the worst available price. Adding leverage to "recover" converts a drawdown into a liquidation. Both feel like control and are the opposite.

If you sized positions so that a large drawdown was survivable, nothing needs to happen. If you did not, the lesson is about sizing rather than about this particular crash, and acting on it now at the low is the most expensive possible time to learn it.

What is actually worth doing

Check your custody. Crashes and exchange failures correlate, and if a venue you use is implicated, moving funds matters far more than any price decision. Then review your written thesis — if you have one — and ask whether anything in it changed.

And set an alert at the level where you would want to buy. Deciding that number now, while you can think, is worth more than any prediction about where the bottom is. The alert will find it or it will not; either way you will not have to be watching.

The mistakes that cost the most

Over-alerting. Forty alerts is not forty times the coverage of one — past a certain density, additional alerts reduce total attention rather than increasing it.

Reacting to a move without checking what caused it. A fall that happens while the whole market falls is a different event from a fall that happens alone, and the correct response differs completely. Checking correlation first takes ten seconds and prevents most panic decisions.

Changing the plan mid-move. The level you chose while calm is better than the one you will choose while watching a candle. If you find yourself widening a stop or moving a target during volatility, that is the moment to close the app rather than the moment to act.

Never reviewing. Most people set up market crashes once and never look at whether it worked. A short monthly review — what fired, what you did, what you would change — compounds faster than any refinement of the setup itself.

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