Bitcoin (BTC) continued its bearish price action over the weekend following the crypto market state, falling to a new three-month low of $18,390, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Bitcoin is trading at around $18,440, down 8% in the last 24 hours despite a 64% increase in daily trading volume. BTC has lost more than 17% of its value in the last week and is now down more than 73% from its all-time high of $68,789.63 in November 2021. Bitcoin’s market capitalization has more than halved, falling from $1.27 trillion in November to under $354 billion.
According to Blockchain.com data, BTC’s network difficulty reached an all-time high of 32.045t yesterday.
The computational challenge associated with mining a block is denoted by network difficulty. More incredible difficulty necessitates greater computational power and significantly impacts miners’ profitability, causing the coin’s price to fall.
Ethereum is following Bitcoin in the Crypto market outcome.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has dropped to under $1,300, an 11% drop in the last 24 hours.
Since its merger on September 15th, Ethereum has lost more than 20% of its value, with a market cap of around $159 billion. According to CoinMarketCap data, ETH was down 73.30% from its all-time high of $4,891.70 in November 2021.
According to Cryptoslam data, NFT trading volumes on Ethereum have dropped by more than 18% in the last 24 hours. In addition, monthly trading volumes for Ethereum-based NFTs have fallen by nearly 30%. According to Defi Llama data, the total value locked (TVL) across all decentralized applications on Ethereum has dropped 12.73% in the last 24 hours, indicating a drop in user interest in DeFi.
Long traders were alarmed.
According to Coinglass data, over $433 million from over 131,000 traders has been liquidated in the crypto market over the last 24 hours, despite today’s bearish price action. Over $379 million, or 87%, of the $433 million liquidated were long positions, indicating the market’s bearish trend.
Over the same period, Ethereum led liquidations with $173 million, followed by Bitcoin with $121 million. The market’s bearish price action is most likely related to the Federal Reserve’s expected rate hike later this week.
According to Reuters, a 100-basis-point increase is not out of the question following August’s raging inflation figures, with most expecting a 50 to 75-basis-point increase. According to CoinMarketCap, other top cryptocurrencies such as Polkadot (down 12%), Avalanche (down 10%), Shiba Inu (down 10%), Polygon (down 12%), and Cardano (down 10%) have also suffered significant losses in the last 24 hours.
