An early Saturday morning slide saw Ethereum slip below the key support level of $1,000, and Bitcoin fall as low as $18,905, representing significant new lows in already bearish crypto market, according to CoinMarketCap.
Ethereum dropped precipitously from $1,076 to $986 in less than two hours.
Bitcoin is down nearly 10% for the day, and continues to hover below the $20,000 mark at press time. The last time Bitcoin was in the $19,000 range was December 2020. Back then, hitting $19,450 was called a “surge” tied to proposed U.S. regulation of stablecoins.
These new lows in the top two “blue chip” cryptocurrencies fall below largely symbolic barriers—$20,000 for Bitcoin and $1,000 for Ethereum. Still, breaching these thresholds could trigger a wave of ‘forced liquidations, which would in turn drive prices down even further.
Even more notably, Bitcoin today fell below its December 2017 high of $19,834—the peak of the last bull run, which began when BTC broke through $1,000 on New Year’s Day of that year. Bitcoin had never fallen below that threshold in prior bear markets.
Ethereum first saw $1,000 in January 2018, and was able to reliably stay above that mark by January of last year.
Investors and analysts continue to scan for the bottom. Swan Bitcoin Analyst Sam Callahan has said that Bitcoin could drop as low as $13,800, representing a drop of more than 80% from its all-time high. The same thing happened in December 2018, when Bitcoin nearly dipped to $3,000.
The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently stands at around $835 billion, down over 7% in the last 24 hours.
That’s a far cry from 221 days ago, when headlines declared a total crypto market cap of $3 trillion. The price of BTC was $66,362 then, with Ethereum hitting $4,782.
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