LONDON – The price of bitcoin fell below $ 20,000 on Saturday for the first time since late 2020, in a new signal that the sale of cryptocurrencies is deepening.
Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, fell below the psychologically important threshold, dropping to 9% to less than $ 19,000 and hovering around that mark, according to cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk.
The last time bitcoin was at this level was in November 2020, when it reached its all-time high of nearly $ 69,000, according to CoinDesk. Many in the industry had believed that it would not fall below $ 20,000.
Bitcoin has now lost more than 70% of its value since reaching this peak.
Ethereum, another very popular cryptocurrency that has fallen in recent weeks, suffered a similar crash on Saturday.
It is the latest sign of turmoil in the cryptocurrency industry amid widespread turmoil in financial markets. Investors are selling riskier assets because central banks are raising interest rates to fight accelerating inflation.
The global market value of cryptocurrency assets has fallen from $ 3 trillion to less than $ 1 trillion, according to coinmarketcap.com, a company that tracks cryptocurrency prices.
A wave of cryptocurrency crisis has wiped out tens of billions of dollars worth of coins and sparked urgent calls to regulate the freewheeling industry. Last week, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate to regulate digital assets. The crypto industry has also stepped up its pressure efforts, flooding $ 20 million in races in Congress this year for the first time, according to records and interviews.
Cesare Fracassi, a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin who runs the school’s Blockchain Initiative, believes that the fall of Bitcoin below the psychological threshold is no big deal. Instead, he said the focus should be on the latest news from loan platforms.
The cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network said this month that it was pausing all withdrawals and transfers, with no sign of when it would give its 1.7 million customers access to its funds.
“There’s a lot of turbulence in the market,” Fracassi said. “And the reason prices are going down is because there’s a lot of concern that the sector is over-leveraging.”
Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform announced on Tuesday that it has laid off about 18% of its workforce, with CEO and co-founder of the company Brian Armstrong blaming a “cryptocurrency winter” acosta.
Stablecoin Terra imploded last month, losing tens of billions of dollars in value in a matter of hours.
Crypto had permeated much of popular culture before its recent fall, with many Super Bowl ads promoting digital assets and YouTube celebrities and personalities regularly promoting it on social media.