The latest leg down pushed Bitcoin below $19,511, the high the coin hit during its last bull cycle in 2017, which it reached at the end of that year. Throughout its roughly 12-year trading history, Bitcoin has never dropped below\u00a0previous cycle peaks.<\/p>\n
Altcoins were no exception to soured investor appetite in the wake of Bitcoin\u2019s fall, with every token on Bloomberg\u2019s cryptocurrency monitor trading in the red. Cardano, Solana, Dogecoin and Polkadot recorded falls of between 12% and 14%, while privacy tokens such as Monero and Zcash lost as much as 16%.<\/p>\n
A toxic mix of bad news cycles and higher interest rates has been deleterious to riskier assets like crypto. The Federal Reserve raised its main interest rate on June 15 by three-quarters of a percentage point — the biggest increase since 1994 — and central bankers signaled they will keep hiking aggressively this year in the fight to tame inflation.<\/p>\n \u201cInvestors are continuing to position defensively following last year\u2019s liquidity-driven digital asset bull market,\u201d Alkesh Shah, head of crypto and digital assets strategy at Bank of America Corp., said in a note on Friday. \u201cAlthough painful, removing the sector\u2019s froth is likely healthy as investors shift focus to projects with clear road maps to cash flow and profitability versus purely revenue growth.\u201d<\/p>\n Broader signs of stress emerged with last month\u2019s collapse of the Terra blockchain, and worsened this week following crypto lender Celsius Network Ltd.\u2019s recent decision to halt withdrawals.<\/p>\n Adding to the mood, crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital suffered large losses and said it was considering asset sales or a bailout, while another lender, Babel Finance, followed in Celsius\u2019s footsteps on Friday. Even long-term holders who have avoided selling until now are coming\u00a0under pressure, according to researcher Glassnode.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter Celsius, the focus last few days has been Three Arrow Capital and Babel Finance.\u201d said Teong Hng, chief executive of Hong Kong-based crypto investment firm Satori Research. \u201cSu Zhu, the founder of 3AC seems to be missing in action, after purportedly suffering huge losses due to massive drop in crypto this round.\u201d<\/p>\n Stablecoins \u2014 a type of crypto asset pegged to the value of a fiat currency like the US dollar — have also struggled.<\/p>\n The top four stablecoins saw exchange net outflows last week that were 4.5 times larger than the prior week, Bank of America\u2019s Shah said, having charted net outflows in eight of the 10 prior weeks.<\/p>\n Stablecoins are often relied upon by crypto traders to move funds around the ecosystem without needing to exit into traditional currencies, so persistent outflows indicate that investors remain defensive, he added.<\/p>\n Even with the piercing of the key $20,000 level, historical data show that Bitcoin may find key support around that mark as previous selloffs demonstrate where the token usually finds points of resilience, according to Mike McGlone, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.<\/p>\n Bitcoin may \u201cbuild a base around $20,000 as it did at about $5,000 in 2018-19 and $300 in 2014-15,\u201d he said in a note on Wednesday. \u201cDeclining volatility and rising prices are earmarks of the maturing digital store-of-value.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the digital currency is fast approaching its December 2020 low of $17,589. It traded as low as $13,222 the prior month that year.<\/p>\n The crypto market now stands at a fraction of its heights in late 2021, when Bitcoin traded near $69,000 and traders poured cash into speculative investments of all stripes. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies was around $881 billion on Sunday, down from $3 trillion in November, according to pricing data from CoinGecko.<\/p>\n Bitcoin plunged through several closely watched price levels to the lowest since late 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":394737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[187,55099,68572,43338],"class_list":["post-449306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-bitcoin","tag-cryptocurrency-prices","tag-dogecoin","tag-ether"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449306"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Taking](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Taking-a-Tumble-800x449.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nNow read: Bitcoin collapse hits \u201cdarkest phase\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"