Markets are seeing red early Tuesday morning as Bitcoin drops 7% and Ethereum lags 10%.
The global crypto market cap has contracted by 8% since yesterday, having dropped below $2.5 trillion after last week getting within 5% of matching its all-time high market capitalization crypto markets last saw in early November 2021.
At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is $63,142.39 after having briefly dropped below the $63,000 mark, according to CoinGecko data. It's been a rapid change of scenery for Bitcoin traders. BTC set a new all-time high by inching above $73,000 last week.
This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Hits All-Time High, Then Gets Battered, While Solana Soars
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt. Another rollercoaster week for Bitcoin—and the wider crypto market. First, the biggest digital coin's price by market cap seemed unstoppable when it comfortably traded above $70,000 at the start of the week. Then, on Wednesday, the price of Bitcoin hit another all-time high of $73,737, CoinGecko shows. But things slowed down when hotter-than-expected inflation figures from February dropped. A stock and Bitcoin sell-off ensued, exacerbated by crypto f...
Ethereum has fared even worse than Bitcoin.
Early Tuesday morning, the Ethereum price was $3,230.05. That's a 10% drop since yesterday and 20% lower than it was this time last week, when the Ethereum community was ramping up for the Dencun upgrade to go live on mainnet.
The stark Bitcoin and Ethereum price drops mean that a lot of long positions opened by optimistic traders have been liquidated, according to CoinGlass. In the past day, more than $500 million worth of long and $100 million worth of short positions have been liquidated across digital asset contracts.
GM!🌞 #Bitcoin liquidation heatmap (12 hour)
👉https://t.co/rQ5IAGwkbc pic.twitter.com/1yBkf2Su7p
— CoinGlass (@coinglass_com) March 19, 2024
When a trader opens a long position, it's essentially bet that an asset will increase in price by a certain date. Ideally for investors, they only sell the asset once they've realized some gains and want to take profit. But in extreme cases, an exchange or brokerage can force a trader to liquidate because the asset has seen a big drop in price.
Meanwhile, many of the meme coins that were stealing the show a few weeks back have seen even larger losses. That's usually the case for meme coins. When the market's largest assets, like Bitcoin and Ethereum see price movement, memes can especially volatile and see outsized gains and losses.
Bitcoin Gains Are Pushing Traders Into Meme Coins, Says Bitwise Exec
Why exactly are meme coins like Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Pepe (PEPE) pumping all of a sudden? Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says there’s a method to the madness. “The primary driver of alt season is a classic ‘wealth effect,’" wrote Hougan on Twitter Friday. “Crypto natives make money in Bitcoin, feel rich, and then look for more speculative assets to invest in.” Bitcoin (BTC), the long-reigning king of the crypto market, is up 54% year to date, largely thanks to inflows and media hype s...
Solana meme coins Dogwifhat (WIF) and Bonk (BONK) have dropped 22% and 19% respectively in the past day. And Floki Inu (FLOKI), one of their Ethereum-based Shiba Inu-themed meme coin competitors, has shed 20% since yesterday.
Even Jupiter, the Solana DEX that yesterday pledged to help out the Slerf presale buyers who just lost $10 million, has seen its JUP token drop 16% since this time on Monday.
