Bitcoin Drops Even Lower, Cryptocurrency’s Market Cap Dips Below US$1T
Bitcoin continues to drop so low two crypto exchanges paused all transactions in a scramble to survive.
The last few days have been quite bad for the cryptocurrency market. Popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have continued to reach new levels. All this has prompted cryptocurrency lending platforms to pause all withdrawals. Even the Australian market isn’t untouched by the global downslides. Read on for the details.
Bitcoin and other crypto
Bitcoin has reached the levels it was at in the early days of the pandemic. The key reason for the sorry state of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the panic among traders. On Tuesday morning AEST, Bitcoin reached a two-year low at US$ 22,601. In the afternoon, things worsened as Bitcoin price reached another low of US$ 20,834.50. All in all, it meant a drop of over 15% in only 24 hours.
Ethereum also didn’t do so well. It suffered a 16% fall and reached US$ 1,075. The coins were doing so well only in November last year. At that time, Bitcoin was worth US$ 69,000 a piece, and Ether was US$ 4,865 at its peak.
The recent downfall impacts the entire cryptocurrency market. The total market cap of cryptocurrency has decreased below US$ 1 trillion.
The bear run of Bitcoin was so extreme that two major crypto exchanges had to suspend trading transactions. Binance chose to suspend bitcoin withdrawals, and The Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency lending platform, paused all withdrawals citing “extreme market conditions.” It impacted its estimated 1.7 million users.
Impact on the Australian Market
The Australian share market hasn’t been doing so well recently. It went down more than 5% and has wiped tens of billions of dollars off the value of shares. The core reason for this downfall is the sinking of global markets on worries that aggressive interest rate hikes done by the US central bank might push North America into recession.
The broad All Ordinaries index was down 4.8% to 6,806. About $116 billion had been wiped from the value of the market by midday. The ASX 200 index, which is the index of the top 200 companies, also lost 4.7% at 12:15 pm AEST. Technology stocks were the hardest hit thanks to a sell-off on Wall Street. The biggest loser was Zip, a buy now pay later firm. Even the Australian dollar fell below 70 US.
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