Bitcoin is losing more than 4% in trading on Friday amid a general investor withdrawal from risky assets amid traders’ concerns that global central bank rates will be held at higher-than-expected levels for longer than expected.
Bitcoin’s exchange rate fell 4.1 percent to $26474, according to Kraken data as of 12:55 p.m. Q4.
The cryptocurrency, which traded around $29,000 the day before, began to fall sharply in price amid rising US Treasuries yields, which reduced the attractiveness of investing in high-risk assets.
This triggered a massive liquidation of bitcoin positions on cryptocurrency exchanges. The bitcoin exchange rate fell by more than $2,000 within minutes during trading on Thursday, from $28400 to less than $26,000, Market Watch noted.
The volume of bitcoin positions closed in the past 24 hours exceeded $1 billion, according to Coinglass.
Experts note that the sharp drop in the cryptocurrency’s rate coincided with the release of an article in The Wall Street Journal about the sale of bitcoins by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The article stated that SpaceX wrote down the value of the $373 million worth of bitcoins it owned in 2021 and 2022 and sold the cryptocurrency. WSJ did not specify exactly when SpaceX sold the bitcoins.
Bitcoin continues to rise in price on Tuesday and is worth more than $30 thousand, MarketWatch reports.
The bitcoin exchange rate is up 3.2% to $30,074 thousand during trading, according to CoinDesk. The day before, quotes reached $30.321 thousand, exceeding the $30 thousand mark for the first time since June 10, 2022. Since the beginning of the year, the cryptocurrency has soared by 81%.
Bitcoin is supported by the fact that some investors perceive cryptocurrency as a protective asset and invest in it amid the banking crisis, said David Tavil, president and co-founder of ProChain Capital.
“I believe there has also been an influx of liquidity from Asia, especially from Asian high-tech companies looking for a place to invest,” wrote Truflation founder Stefan Rast.
Bitcoin has reached $30 thousand, having overcome a serious level of resistance, Bloomberg reports. From the point of view of technical analysis, the next targets for the cryptocurrency may be $30,800 thousand and $31,200 thousand.
Bitcoin price collapsed by more than 60% in 2022: at the end of December, the cryptocurrency was around $16,500,000 compared to its historic high of almost $70,000 in November 2021.
Bitcoin in 2021 was supported by the inflow of capital to the markets and extremely low or zero interest rates, with Goldman Sachs experts at the time even comparing bitcoin to gold, writes Trading Economics.
Meanwhile, a jump in inflation in 2022 and tighter financial conditions triggered a collapse in the cryptocurrency market.
The sell-off intensified first as TerraUSD steiblocoin collapsed and then after the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the world’s second-largest.
Bitcoin is down 0.8 percent Friday at $16,471,000, according to CoinDesk.
The bitcoin price collapsed to a 2-year low in trading Tuesday amid the bankruptcy of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.
The bitcoin exchange rate was $15,735,000 as of 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, with the value of the most popular cryptocurrency dropping to $15,480,000 during trading, which is the lowest value since November 11, 2020, according to CoinDesk.
The cryptocurrency market has lost more than $1.4 trillion this year due to a number of problems, including unrealized projects and lack of liquidity due to the global economic downturn. These difficulties have left many cryptocurrency companies facing a string of bankruptcies.
One such company was the owner of the FTX exchange. The company initiated bankruptcy under Article 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in early October. Before that, another major cryptocurrency exchange – Binance, which was planning to buy the assets of FTX – abandoned the deal after due diligence. The company explained its decision by the identified errors in the management of customer funds, as well as reports about the investigations conducted by U.S. regulators in relation to this site.
In addition, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said his company will start selling FTX tokens owned by FTX. This led to the collapse of FTX, whose market valuation once reached $32 billion.
A day earlier, it was revealed that FTX owed the 50 largest lenders $3.1 billion, with a total of 1 million lenders lending to it.
Investors fear that the collapse of FTX could cause a chain reaction in the sector, which further puts pressure on the cryptocurrency market. On Monday, shares of Coinbase Global (SPB: COIN) Inc., another major cryptocurrency exchange operator, plummeted 8.9 percent in U.S. trading, with its market capitalization plunging below $10 billion, the lowest since Coinbase went public.
Bitcoin fell to a two-year low in trading Friday on news that cryptocurrency exchange FTX has initiated bankruptcy under Section 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
The company’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, has stepped down, according to a statement circulated by FTX via Twitter. John Ray III has been named the company’s new CEO.
Bitcoin is losing 3.8% in trading, at $16,803 as of 5:40 p.m. Ksk. Earlier in the session, it was down to a two-year low of $16,351.52, Coindesk notes.
Ether (Ethereum) fell 4.5% to $1255.8 and Binance Coin fell 6.2% to $285.11.
Earlier on Friday, the head of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao, said during a conference in Indonesia that the cryptocurrency sector is facing a crisis similar to the financial crisis of 2008, which could lead to the collapse of several companies in the sector in the coming weeks.
The rate of bitcoin fell by 4% during trading on Thursday after the publication of data on higher-than-expected inflation in the United States.
The price of bitcoin at 16:11 CST fell by 4.4% compared to the closing level of the previous trading and amounted to $18,312 thousand, which is the lowest level since June 18.
The rate of ether (Ether) fell by 6.6%, to $1.212 thousand.
Consumer prices (CPI index) in the US in September rose by 8.2% compared to the same month last year, showed data published on Thursday by the country’s Ministry of Labor. Thus, inflation slowed to a seven-month low from 8.3% in August, but was higher than the 8.1% expected by analysts polled by Bloomberg.
On a monthly basis, the CPI index increased by 0.4%, although analysts were expecting a rise of 0.2%.
Meanwhile, consumer price growth excluding the cost of food and energy (Core CPI) in September accelerated to 6.6% in annual terms from 6.3% in August.
“The whole world is looking at US inflation data to try and predict what the Fed is doing,” said Stefan Rast, founder of research firm Truflation.
Higher-than-expected inflation raises the possibility of another 75 basis point rate hike at the next Fed meeting on November 1-2.
