Ethereum Sinks 8% in Saturday Afternoon Dip

The price of Ethereum has fallen by 8% in the past 24 hours, according to data from metrics site Nomics.

Ethereum’s price started to drop from 6 am UTC, when it sank, steadily but almost without reprieve, from $2,548 to its current price of $2,374. Ethereum’s market cap is now $274 billion.

ETH

+0.86%$1,827.13

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Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $647 billion, has fallen by 6.8% in the past 24 hours to $34,500. Binance Coin has fallen by 7.18% to $318, and Cardano by 10% to $1.4.

BTC

+13.61%$95,436.16

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In fact, most of the top coins have fallen, and today’s mid-afternoon dip has seared 4.85% off of crypto’s global market capitalization, which now sits at $1.59 trillion.

The dip even erased some of the startling gains made by privacy coins Monero and ZCash this morning. Just a few hours ago, they recorded daily gains of close to 30%. The dip has trimmed that to 7.82% for Monero and 2.94% for ZCash.

XMR

+28.25%$275.68

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Ethereum’s woes—along with other cryptocurrencies—started just after the coin hit its all-time high of about $4,350 on May 12. Hours later, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk slammed Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining mechanism as environmentally unsound. Ethereum, like many other cryptocurrencies, uses the same.

Then last week, three major payments associations in China reconfirmed their commitment to a 2017 regulation that prohibited financial institutions from dealing with crypto. The associations also reiterated warnings against crypto speculation.

That news was largely misreported as a new ban on crypto, fuelling fears across the crypto market. Ethereum fell by 38% during the crash. Days later, a state committee of the Chinese government said that Bitcoin mining and trading would be monitored to "prevent and control financial risks." Ethereum fell to lows of $2,374 on May 28.

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Here’s How China’s Crypto FUD Will Play Out

For hundreds of years preceding the early 20th century, China’s emperors banned international trade and cloistered the country from the rest of the world. The so-called “closed-door” policy (闭关锁国) was partly a response to the Opium Wars with the British, who had been ruthlessly peddling the drug throughout the previous century and had addicted as many as 12 million people in the country.  Though crypto is hardly as addictive as opium, the current regime in China appears to be treating it with...

Crypto-skeptical sentiment from China continues. Today, the local media—tightly controlled by the Chinese government—published criticisms of crypto derivatives trading, tweeted Colin Wu, a Chinese cryptocurrency journalist.