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(Bloomberg) -- Bitcoin remained tethered near the the lower end of its recent trading range even as global financial markets showed signs of a renewal of risk appetite, keeping the token on course for its steepest monthly decline since 2022.
The original cryptocurrency fell as much as 3% to around $62,557, before paring the decline on Tuesday. It’s now down roughly 24% in February, set for its worst monthly performance since June 2022. That year, the implosion of stablecoin project TerraUSD triggered a daisy chain of failures that included crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and BlockFi, the lender.
Bitcoin is also on track for a fifth straight monthly decline, its longest losing streak since 2018 — a bruising period for crypto markets defined by the unraveling of an initial coin offering boom.
The slide, which extends a selloff that began in October, comes amid broader risk-off sentiment across global markets after President Donald Trump announced plans to raise global tariffs to 15%, a move that unsettled investors and weighed on equities and other higher-risk assets.
“President Trump’s decision to raise global tariffs to 15% rattled risk assets broadly, and Bitcoin moved with them,” said Rachael Lucas, crypto analyst at BTC Markets. “Despite the ‘digital gold’ narrative, Bitcoin continues to trade as a risk asset. When macro fear spikes, capital rotates toward traditional safe havens. Bitcoin is not there yet.”
The crypto market calamity of 2022 is still reverberating. On Monday, the administrator for Terraform Labs — the entity behind the TerraUSD stablecoin — sued Jane Street Group LLC. Todd Snyder, a bankruptcy court-appointed administrator, claimed in the complaint that Jane Street used “non-public information to front-run trading that hastened the collapse of Terraform.”
A Jane Street spokesperson called the suit “desperate” and “a transparent attempt to extract money,” according to a statement.
Support Zone
Since the massive selloff started four months ago, cautious sentiment has plagued the crypto market, and Bitcoin has broken through multiple key support levels as it headed lower.
“Bitcoin slipped below $60,000 in early February, but there was a steady tug-of-war near current levels, drawing attention to the outcome of the local battle between bulls and bears,” Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said in a note. “The outcome will determine whether we see a recovery rebound or a new downward momentum.”
US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs saw more than $200 million in outflows on Monday. Meanwhile, demand for downside insurance remains roughly twice that of bullish bets in options trading, according to data from Deribit. The next support level is $60,000, a price that Bitcoin nearly reached earlier this month.
Bitcoin is edging ever closer to its 200-week moving average of $58,503, Tony Sycamore, an analyst at IG Australia, wrote in a research note. Whether the token holds above that level — as it managed to in early February — could determine whether prices stabilize.
Conversely, a fall to below the $58,000 to $60,000 support zone “would likely open the door to a deeper pullback,” Sycamore wrote.
The crypto market as a whole is also under pressure. The total market value of all cryptocurrencies has fallen by more than $120 billion between Monday and Tuesday, according to CoinGecko.
--With assistance from Melos Ambaye.
