After showing a massive rally over the last few weeks, the bulls finally lose their hold on the market to the bears. Overall crypto market loses nearly $24 billion with Bitcoin price dropping below $7200 levels.
Volatility in the cryptocurrency market is back again as Bitcoin and major altcoins prices lost over 10% in a few hours. In the last 24-hours, the overall cryptocurrency market has lost $26 billion currently being at $228 billion. After a week of a solid market rally, it looks like the bulls have lost the steam with bears taking over the charge.
In the last 24-hours, Bitcoin price lost nearly $1000 dropping below $7200 levels, according to the chart on CoinMarketCap. At the press time, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $7268 with a market cap of $128 billion. Besides, the daily trading activity looks high with volumes crossing $30 billion in the last 24 hours.
The reason behind this massive sell-off could be large sell orders triggering several stop-loss positions. Today, at 02:00 UTC, a massive sell order of 3,645 BTC worth $26.8 million was executed and could be the major reason behind Bitcoin’s sharp drop.
BitMex’s Massive Short-Selling
Furthermore, crypto exchange BitMex is the leader for offering short-selling and leverage, allowing investors to profit from the falling prices. Eric Conner, a developer at Gnosis, tweeted:
“For reference someone put a 5k BTC sell on bitstamp, which bitmex uses for 50% of its feed and it appears to have tripped some algos which made a cascade on mex.”
He also hinted that with such massive volatility the possibility of Bitcoin ETF arrival reduces further.
A whale crashes the entire crypto market 20% in 5 minutes with a single sell order on the books and people actually think an ETF is coming? 🤣
— Eric Conner (@econoar) May 17, 2019
Furthermore, global market analyst Alex Krüger stresses that with an overnight 10% drop in BTC price, the popular narrative of Bitcoin acting as a hedge in the ongoing U.S.-China trade war can be put to rest. He tweeted:
“We can now put aside that nonsensical narrative of bitcoin as a hedge for US-China trade wars. The move up was engineered by a handful of parties, and so was this crash. Not as sexy, I know”.
Altcoins Take a Major Plunge
Besides Bitcoin, the altcoin market is witnessing a heavy pull-back. Almost all of the top ten altcoins have lost over 10% today.
After massive rally over the last week, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) price has slipped below $250. At the press time, Ethereum is 8% down trading at $242 with a market cap of $25.7 billion. In comparison to other altcoins, Ethereum has effectively managed to hold back its loss in single digits.
XRP, on the other hand, has lost a whopping 15% wiping-off its early week gains. The XRP price has slipped below $0.40 and is currently trading at $0.38 with a market cap of $16.1 billion.
Commenting on the overall market drop, Jehan Chu, co-founder of Kenetic Capital said:
“This last drop was likely caused by a combination of profit-taking and also algorithmic trading compounding the swift fall. We can expect these types of steep rises and drops to continue for some time until institutional investors grow market volume.”
Chu further added:
“The key takeaway from the past few weeks is that with each of these surges, the overall interest and investment continues to expand around a growing core of real blockchain use and adoption.”
