Bitcoin bombshell: Crypto king’s slump nears $44,000 as it heads for biggest weekly loss since March last year

From briefly topping the $58,000 price mark this past Monday, Bitcoin has dropped to $44,239 at the time of filing this report. The cryptocurrency has also already slumped by 21 per cent this week. This may turn out to be the biggest weekly drop for crypto bellwether, if the losses are held through the weekend, since the second week of March last year when prices had declined by 33 per cent, according to Coindesk data. The current price for Bitcoin was the lowest since $44,716 on February 9, 2021.

Since Monday, the price has been largely on a downward slope except for few spurts from $45,393 on Tuesday to $51,600 on Thursday and from $44,647 on Friday to $48,330 on Saturday. The decline may be largely attributed to rising bond yields and losses in the global stock markets. According to Coindesk, The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield increased to 1.61 per cent in a one-year high on Thursday. This took the year-to-date gain to more than 50 basis points and triggered fear of an early unwinding of stimulus by the U.S. Federal Reserve that pushed stocks, bitcoin, and gold lower. According to the data from CoinMarketCap, the decline in Bitcoin prices has pushed its market cap down from $1.04 trillion last Sunday to $833 billion at the time of filing this report.

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“It is a market that was ridiculously overbought and will probably be so once again in the not-too-distant future,” Craig Erlam, a senior market analyst at OANDA Europe, said in a note Friday, Bloomberg reported. The prices for Bitcoin, otherwise, had seen an unprecedented surge in the past year. From $3,865 as of February 19, 2019, the prices increased 15x to the $52,000-mark this past Monday. It peaked at $40,000 during the second week of January this year but dropped down to the $30,000-mark towards the end of the third week of January. Currently, there are 8,612 cryptocurrencies in circulation with a combined market cap of $1.34 trillion with Bitcoin dominating 61.6 per cent of the total value. Following Bitcoin, other top cryptos Ethereum, Steller, XRP, and Cardano had a market cap of $153 billion, $42.27 billion, $40.98 billion, and $38.08 billion, as per Coindesk data.

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