Bitcoin hovered around $42,000 yesterday, as it has been for some time now, but it fell below $38.000 today after the US stock market had another plunge yesterday, its lowest dollar value since August 2021, according to CoinDesk. It later regained some ground and was trading at $38,705.70, down 6.5% from its level late Thursday and more than 40% from its record in November 2021.
Data from Coinshares shows that there were $73 million in outflows last week, which is the 5th consecutive week of outflows. Total outflows over this period for the whole crypto market totals to $532 million, which has been the sharpest outflow since 2018.
According to Marcus Sotiriou, Analyst at the UK based digital asset broker GlobalBlock, the reason behind this sudden drop could be the market being spooked by the Federal Reserve raising rates this year, but when the stock market sees some relief, there could also be a strong squeeze to the upside for Bitcoin and the whole market.
Mastercard has partnered with Coinbase to make payments on Coinbase’s NFT marketplace more accessible. Mastercard said they see even greater potential for NFTs’ underlying tech to go beyond art and collectibles into many more areas. NFT volumes have not dropped off, as Open Sea is on track for its biggest ever monthly volume. The fact that the NFT market is barely affected by Bitcoin’s price, only shows how Bitcoin is losing its role in leading the market.
Marcus Sotiriou said: “I think the crypto industry will become increasingly non-monolithic over the coming years, with actual use cases coming to fruition. Mastercard understands this concept and once NFTs are being used in everyday life I think we will see stability in the market, where Bitcoin’s price is even less important.”
In addition to payments giant Mastercard partnering with Coinbase, Google is also rumoured to be working with them, to develop a digital payments functionality. According to Bloomberg, Google has hired a former PayPal executive to run its payments division which involves letting users store crypto in digital cards. Google thinks Crypto is something to pay a lot of attention to. As user demand and merchant demand evolves, Google should evolve with it.
It’s pretty clear that if one of the largest companies in the world is integrating crypto into their service, this is a giant leap towards mass adoption for the crypto space.
