Bitcoin and Ethereum prices are down roughly 10% this Friday, with BTC trading at $21.3k after rejecting the $25k range and losing momentum last night. The global cryptocurrency market is down by 8%, struggling to remain above the $1 trillion mark. The sharp price decline comes with increased trading volume, with the 24-hour volume for Bitcoin up 26% and up 25% for Ethereum.
Key Points:
There isn’t an apparent reason behind BTC’s price correction today, which sent the crypto asset tumbling below the $22k range. However, a decrease in price combined with an increase in trading volume indicates a price continuation pattern, meaning BTC and ETH are likely to continue correcting over the weekend.
With the sharp price decline for Bitcoin and Ethereum, we’re likely to see BTC dip below the $20k level, breaking below its monthly low of $20.8k. On the upside, Ethereum’s monthly low is at $1,400, and the crypto asset is quite a ways away from dipping to those levels.
In some bearish news, a report from Cointelegraph suggests that crypto exchanges could manipulate the price by creating and selling BTC only in their system. After all, since exchanges don’t need proof of owning actual Bitcoin, they could manipulate their order books by creating fake buy or sell orders with little or no oversight.
This stresses the importance of regulation over cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide. Those exchanges that refuse to go through asset audits should be removed from popular crypto price aggregation platforms like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.
Unfortunately, it’s common for unknown exchanges to inflate their order books with fake buy and sell volume to make their platform appear larger than it is. We aren’t naming any names, but if you look at the exchange section for CoinMarketCap, most of the unknown exchanges with millions in trading volume are fake.
While Bitcoin’s bearish momentum this Friday created a cascade effect affecting other significant assets like Ethereum, Solana, BNB, XRP, etc. Ethereum still manages to hold its valuation at half of Bitcoin’s and will continue to outperform BTC in terms of price action as the upcoming merge trade contributes to the bullish momentum of Ethereum.
With stocks also showing a slight price decrease this Friday, with Dow Jones futures dropping and Bed Bath & Beyond stock crashing this weekend, the goal for crypto markets will be to remain above the $1 trillion support level. If the market crashes below that, the bears will take control and continue pushing cryptocurrencies to monthly lows.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any service.
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