The leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC), hit a new all-time high of nearly $74,000 yesterday, but a bearish trend quickly took over, pushing it down to a weekly low.
Altcoins also experienced significant losses in the last 24 hours, with major drops in prices for XRP, ADA, AVAX, DOGE, and SHIB.
Bitcoin’s Recent Decline Bitcoin has been on an impressive run in recent weeks, soaring past $50,000 and breaking its 2021 all-time high of $69,000 last week.
The rally didn’t stop there, as BTC continued its climb after a brief correction, reaching over $70,000 by the end of last week and hitting a new all-time high of $73,900 (on Bitstamp) yesterday morning.
However, signs of a possible correction began to emerge after such a rapid rise. The retracement started yesterday with a drop to $70,000 but worsened today when BTC fell further to a weekly low of $65,600.
It has since recovered slightly to just above $67,000. Despite this, its market cap has decreased by over $100 billion in a day to slightly above $1.3 trillion on CoinGecko. Its dominance over other cryptocurrencies has also decreased slightly to 49.5%.
As is often the case, when BTC experiences a significant movement, so do most altcoins. Ethereum, for example, failed to break through the $4,000 mark and has dropped by 7.5% since then, falling below $3,700. BNB reached a multi-year high yesterday but has now dropped to $570 after a similar daily retracement.
Other cryptocurrencies like Cardano, Avalanche, Dogecoin, Ripple, Polkadot, Polygon, Toncoin, and Shiba Inu have all seen double-digit declines in the past day.
With most other mid- and lower-cap altcoins facing similar losses, the total cryptocurrency market cap has dropped by over $250 billion in a day, down to $2.650 trillion.