Bitcoin (BTC) took a clobbering when Wednesday’s European trading session opened, with the BTC/USDT pair tumbling 3% in a matter of hours, eventually closing the day 5% lower at around US$28,800.
Twitter users pointed out substantial selling action on the Binance exchange, though it is unclear where the sell orders came from (Government? Elon? Mt Gox?)
Speaking of Elon, Tesla missed its revenue forecast per yesterday’s first-quarter earnings call; perhaps investors were anxious that the EV giant was poised to offload its hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the digital gold.
Regardless, the 1k dip was not a reaction to any major catalyst event, thus was likely a bout of profit taking, hardly a surprise given the bitcoin is still around 80% higher year to date.
Wednesday’s dip drags bitcoin (BTC) below 30k – Source: currency.com
The intraday dip resulted in some US$50mln long positions getting liquidated out of the market, the largest volume in four weeks.
BTC/USDT saw a modest rebound to US$28,900 in this morning’s Asia trading window, sparking hopes of a positive day ahead.
Bitcoin still has positive tailwinds behind it, particularly in anticipation of the 2024 halving event, which has historically been a groundbreaking cycle for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Ethereum suffered an 8% hit to its spot price on Wednesday, bringing the second-largest crypto asset down to US$1,930, with some buying support this morning knocking ETH/USDT back up to US$1,950. Now 2k is the obvious short-term goal for the ETH bulls.
Altcoins take a dive
The past 24 hours have been uniformly bearish for the blue-chip altcoins, with Ripple (XRP), Polygon (MATIC), Polkadot (DOT) and Litecoin (LTC) leading the way with losses in the upper single digits.
Dogecoin (DOGE) stayed relatively buoyant, dipping by around 1%, while Cardano (ADA) and Binance’s BNB coin took the middle road.
Checking in on the decentralised finance (DeFi) space, liquid staking platform Lido (LDO) remains the largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL), having added over 4% to US$12bn in the past week.
Lido has seen a surge in user uptake since Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade earlier this month opened the doors to full-scope staking, of which Lido is the primary platform to participants.
Decentralised exchange Uniswap also added around 2% of TVL, while MakerDAO, AAVE and Curve saw losses.
TVL across all DeFi platforms currently stands at US$51bn, while global cryptocurrency market cap currently stands at US$1.22, having dipped 4% overnight.