On Saturday, Bitcoin lost a fifth of its value due to profit-taking and macro-economic concerns, resulting in roughly a billion dollars worth of selling across cryptocurrencies.
At 09:20 GMT, Bitcoin was trading at $47,495, down 12%. During the session, it went as low as $41,967.5, bringing the day’s losses to 22%. The ether coin, which is tied to the ethereum blockchain network, has dropped more than 10% as a result of the cryptocurrency selloff.
The market capitalization of the 11,392 currencies tracked by cryptocurrency analytics platform Coingecko fell over 15% to $2.34 trillion. Last month, when bitcoin hit a new high of $69,000, its worth temporarily surpassed $3 trillion.
The drop comes after a tumultuous week in the global markets. On Friday, global markets and benchmark U.S. bond yields fell as statistics revealed that employment growth in the United States slowed in November, and the Omicron strain of the coronavirus left investors on edge.
Justin d’Anethan, the Hong Kong-based head of exchange sales at cryptocurrency exchange EQONEX, said he’d been keeping an eye on the rise in leverage ratios in the cryptocurrency markets, as well as how major investors were shifting their coins from wallets to exchanges. The latter is usually indicative of a desire to sell.
As policymakers deal with the consequences of cryptocurrencies and how to effectively regulate them, the hearing will be the first time prominent actors in the crypto markets will testify before US Congress.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States rejected WisdomTree’s second request for a spot-bitcoin exchange-traded fund last week.
According to data from another site, Coinglass, approximately $1 billion worth of cryptocurrencies were sold in the last 24 hours, with the majority of the transactions taking place on digital exchange Bitfinex.
“If anything, this is an opportunity for many investors who previously felt they had missed the boat to purchase the drop. We can see tether being purchased at a premium, implying that individuals are preparing capital in the crypto sector to do precisely that “D’Anethan was referring to the cryptocurrency world’s largest stable coin.
The cost of holding bitcoin via perpetual futures, which peaked at 0.06 percent in October, has also fallen, indicating that traders have turned negative.
The financing rate on BitMEX, a cryptocurrency trading platform, decreased to a negative 0.18 percent from 0.01 percent for the most of November.
