Bitcoin Falls Below $44k As Crypto Prices Continue to Slide

The crypto market is suffering heavy losses as prices continue to fall.

By Tim Hakki

In brief

• Many cryptocurrencies have suffered pullbacks of 25% or more.
• The correction could be due to the growth of US Treasury bond yields.
• Cardano's ADA, which was pumping this week, is being pulled back down.

The crypto market correction continues its downward spiral. Bitcoin briefly sank to a low of $43,796. It's down 7% in the last 24 hours, capping a dark week that shaved about 25% off its price.

Why the crash? Macroeconomic events could be to blame. On Thursday, 10-year US Treasury bond yields hit their highest level in over a year before settling back down, but not before prompting retail investors to retreat from higher-risk assets like cryptocurrencies. Crypto wasn’t the only asset to suffer, with tech stocks also taking a big hit. 

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In second place, Ethereum also continues to drop. Yesterday, the coin was valued at $1,500. Today it dropped over 6% to its new price at $1,382, making for a seven-day decline of 30%. To get some idea of how steep its loss is, consider that Ethereum was trading at an all-time high of $2,000 just last weekend.

 Cardano’s ADA token is the only cryptocurrency to weather the storm this weekend. ADA hit its all-time high of $1.48 yesterday. But even still, it’s in the red today. It sank 11% overnight to a price of $1.29. That puts it 12% higher than it was last weekend, but it looks like excitement overnext month's hard fork is fizzling out.

Elsewhere in the top 15

Polkadot’s DOT and Uniswap’s UNI lost the most value overnight. DOT dropped 7% to a price of $32. Like Bitcoin, it has suffered a 20% drop in price since the last week. UNI is down to $21.95, a loss of almost 9% in the last day and 30% cheaper than it was last Sunday. 

XRP sits at a price of $0.42, though it’s only down 2% in the last 24 hours, making for relatively mild overnight losses for XRP holders. Chainlink, Litecoin, Uniswap and Bitcoin Cash all sunk a staggering thirty percent since last Sunday. Chainlink’s LINK currently sits at $24.52, 3% down since yesterday. Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash both fell 5% last night, with LTC reaching a price of $164 and BCH settling on $464. 

Little to write home about

There has also been a dearth of news about institutional investment in crypto this week. Tesla set the bar extremely high at the beginning of the month when an SEC filing disclosed the corporation had invested $1.5 billion of its funds into Bitcoin. Similarly, the world's largest asset management company BlackRock, which controls almost $9 trillion in assets under management, announced through its CIO that it is now “dabbling” in Bitcoin. 

The big news for conventional investors this month was that Canada had launched two Exchange Traded Funds for investors keen to trade Bitcoin using a traditional auditable financial instrument. The first ETF, which was launched by Purpose Investments, raised almost half a million dollars in assets under management in its first two days. In the last three days, it has only raised $60 million.

Online arts and crafts gift store Etsy spoke out for the bearish on Friday when it announced through its CEO Josh Silverman that it will not accept Bitcoin as payment or invest funds into it this year. 

So it’s all red today. But we’re all in it for the technology, right?