A market built differently from the ones you grew up with
When people compare a crypto crash to a stock market crash, they're often comparing two very different kinds of markets wearing similar clothing. Traditional stock exchanges have circuit breakers that pause trading when prices move too fast, opening and closing bells that give everyone a breather, and a market structure dominated by large institutional players who often trade on longer time horizons. Crypto markets trade twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with no scheduled pause and no circuit breaker forcing a cooldown when panic sets in. A sharp selloff at three in the morning on a weekend can run further than it would in a market where someone could hit pause.
The other structural difference is liquidity relative to attention. Liquidity is simply how much can be bought or sold without moving the price much. Many crypto assets, even well-known ones, have far less depth in their order books than the amount of capital and attention flowing toward them at any given moment — meaning a relatively modest amount of buying or selling can move price far more than the same dollar amount would in a large, deeply traded stock. Add a much higher share of retail participants trading directly, often on emotion and social media momentum rather than through slower institutional processes, and you get a market where price can swing hard in both directions on comparatively little actual capital changing hands.