An early Saturday morning slide saw ETH slip below the key support level of $1,000, and Bitcoin fall as low as $18,905, representing significant new lows in already bearish crypto market, according to CoinMarketCap.
Ethereum dropped precipitously from $1,076 to $986 in less than two hours.
Bitcoin is down nearly 10 percent for the day, and continues to hover below the $20,000 mark at press time. The last time Bitcoin was in the $19,000 range was December 2020. Back then, hitting $19,450 was called a “surge” tied to proposed U.S. regulation of stablecoins.
Even more notably, Bitcoin today fell below its December 2017 high of $19,834—the peak of the last bull run, which began when BTC broke through $1,000 on New Year’s Day of that year. Bitcoin had never fallen below that threshold in prior bear markets.
These new lows in the top two “blue chip” cryptocurrencies fall below largely symbolic barriers—$20,000 for Bitcoin and $1,000 for Ethereum. Still, breaching these thresholds could trigger a wave of ‘forced liquidations, which would in turn drive prices down even further.
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If these levels break, $20k $BTC & $1k $ETH, we can expect massive sell pressure in the spot markets as dealers hedge themselves. We can also expect that there will be some otc dealers and that will be unable to hedge properly and might go belly up.
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) June 14, 2022
The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently stands at around $835 billion, down over 7% in the last 24 hours.
This is a developing story.
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Source: https://decrypt.co/103229/bitcoin-breaches-19000-ethereum-dips-below-1000