Bitcoin’s price performance took a sharp turn for the worse in the past several hours, dropping to a 6-week low of under $28,800.
As it usually happens, the altcoins are also in the red, and the total crypto market cap has declined by over $20 billion.
Bitcoin doesn’t tend to stay silent for long, which could have prepared the community for what happened in the past 24 hours. This is because the cryptocurrency was trading quietly in a range between $29,000 and $29,000 for roughly a week, and even the US Fed’s interest rate hike on Wednesday didn’t change the landscape all that much.
Then came the weekend, typically a less eventful part of the week by nature, and BTC remained just under $29,500.
However, all of that changed during the early hours of the Asian trading session today when the bears took control and pushed BTC south hard. As a result, the asset fell to its lowest price position since June 21 at $28,750 (on Bitstamp).
It has managed to recover a few hundred dollars since then but still stands under $29,000. Its market capitalization has retraced to $562 billion, and its dominance over the alts sits at 48.3% on CMC.
When BTC heads south, so do most altcoins. This has been the case in the past 24 hours as well. ETH was unable to overcome $1,900 for several consecutive days and a 1.5% decline has now pushed the second-largest crypto to under $1,850. Ripple, Dogecoin, Cardano, Polkadot, Shiba Inu, Tron, and Uniswap are also slightly in the red.
More losses come from the likes of Polygon, Solana, and Litecoin, all of which have dropped by up to 4% daily.
The landscape with Stellar and Optimism is even worse, as XLM is down by 5.5%, while OP has plummeted by 8%.
In total, the crypto market cap has seen $20 billion evaporate from yesterday’s peak and is down to $1.160 trillion on CMC.
