The prices of cryptocurrencies collapsed hard across the board. In some cases, the prices slumped by 20 or more percent, so that Bitcoin as the market leader was traded for a short time at less than 40,000 euros – on Friday, BTC was still traded at more than 50,000 euros. In the meantime, the BTC price has recovered somewhat – buyers: inside took advantage of the dip and pushed the price back to more than 42,000 euros.
The rest of the crypto market is also deep in the red. Ethereum, which this week was preparing to break its own all-time high of more than €4,200, has plummeted hard – down to less than €3,500. Many other crypto assets – from SOL (Solana) to XRP and ADA (Cardano) to DOGE (Dogecoin or LTC (Litecoin) – are down 20 percentage points or more.
Overall, the crypto market lost more than 300 billion euros in market capitalization in just a few hours. The market cap crashed from 2.32 down to 1.96 trillion euros. For the first time since early October, the market cap of crypto assets has fallen below 2 trillion euros. At the moment, a new price formation is taking place – it remains to be seen at which values BTC, ETH and Co will stabilize. For some investors, the time might be right to buy at a lower price than in the last few days, while others might wait for the market to go even lower.
What triggered this new crash? A week ago, there was already a “Black Friday” on a Friday, but it was much softer compared to what is happening now. Already in the previous week, the unstable situation on the regular stock markets as a result of the new virus variant Omikron was considered to be the trigger for price drops, which were also seen in parallel on the crypto exchanges.
Also in the night on Saturday similar events. Tech stocks found in stock indexes like the S&P500 or the NASDAQ100 lost on Friday, and the price of Bitcoin initially fell in step with them. In the U.S., the first Omikron case was recently confirmed – that created negative sentiment. Then, after the market closed, Bitcoin and the other crypto assets continued to plummet and likely then spilled over from the US to Asia. Now, when Europe wakes up on Saturday, it remains to be seen how traders on the Old Continent will react – in any case, they will find BTC and Co. much cheaper than they were before they went to sleep on Friday evening.
Here are the price developments on the stock exchanges (SP500: Orange; Tesla: Turquoise; Microsoft: Yellow; Apple: Turquoise; Alphabet: Green) compared to BTC (Blue). This also shows how much more the crypto market swings than the regular stock market.
El Salvador – the country that became famous for its new strategy as Bitcoin country 2021 – is taking advantage of the supposed favor of the hour. According to President Nayib Bukele, the small Central American state has struck again and bought Bitcoin. The 150 new BTC cost El Salvador 7.3 million dollars.