Crypto Crash: Bitcoin Falls Deeper into a Sea of Red

It was a weekend of two halves for Bitcoin last weekend, with a 6.85% gain through the early part of the weekend to $9,499 suggesting that the cryptocurrency woes may have finally come to an end, with Bitcoin having slumped from its December highs.

Sadly, the weekend high $9,499 was short lived, with Bitcoin ending the weekend down 7.2% to $8,250.1 by the end of Sunday.

While there were highs, there were also plenty of lows, with Bitcoin hitting an intraday low $7,809 on Sunday evening before recovering to Sunday’s close.

The jump in volatility was evident on late Sunday evening as volumes spiked, with investors likely to be looking to get out ahead of Asian investors waking on Monday morning.

Despite the lower level of news traffic over the weekend, the news of major U.S and UK banks following South Korean banks, banning the use of credit cards to purchase cryptocurrencies was certainly a negative one.

The moves were to be expected, though perhaps a little too late, with the market having already collapsed, with credit card holders likely finding themselves in extreme difficulty if they had gone in at $19,000 only to see the value of Bitcoin slump to current levels.

Regulatory pressure will have had some influence on the Banks’ decisions to impose the bans, which are likely to become widespread across the world’s major financial institutions in the coming weeks.

Tomorrow’s much talked about Senate crypto hearing, where the chairmen of the SEC and CFTC will be giving testimony, will be in the forefront of investor minds this morning and through the day, which is unlikely to be a positive for Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrencies for that matter.

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At the time of writing, Bitcoin was down 2.97% to $7,947.52, which is not far off an intraday low $7,756 struck earlier this morning, as the Bitcoin and market struggle continues into a 4^th week.

It’s been an epic collapse, with investors finding it a challenge to shrug off the negative sentiment that continues to draw investor money off the table.

Bitcoin’s market currently sits at $140.59bn, which is pretty poor viewing, with the total cryptomarket cap languishing at $384.15bn.

With global equity markets seeing record gains unravel and Bitcoin and its peers also on the slide, investors are certainly struggling to find somewhere safe to rotate into, other than good old U.S Dollars.

It was certainly not Satoshi’s wish to see billions walk out the door and certainly not to see investors lose their shirts, but such was the speculative nature of the market in the run up to the collapse that it was coming and the market chatter had begun to shift away from euphoria to logic and that’s never going to be a good thing for inflated values.

For the rest of the day, we will expect Bitcoin to continue to struggle, with Cboe Bitcoin futures February contract down $590 to $7,910 at the time of writing. While negative sentiment continues to hit the markets, we will expect the futures market to pin back any speculative moves for now.