Bitcoin Prices Tumble By $1000 Overnight Amid Market Sell Off

By Prashant Jha

Bitcoin after almost one and half month of upward gains, breaking the major market resistance and peaking new price highs for the year. During the recent bullish run, Bitcoin breached the $8,000 price mark but finally saw its progress halted last night, with market sell-offs resulting in the prices to tumble down by a whopping $1000 overnight.

The downfall began on 17th May at 2:00 UTC, when Bitcoin registered a dip of 16.7 percent and its prices fell below the $7,000 mark, however owing to the market volatility, the prices rose again to keep it above the $7,000 and currently trading at $7,344.

The decline in prices also resulted in falling of market capitalization of Bitcoin by $10 billion over the last 24 hour. However, due to the month-long price rally, the week-long market cap is still on the positive side with $14 billion up this week.

What Possibly Led to The Market Sell-Off?

Many investors and analysts believe that the current sell-off occurred due to large sell-orders liquidating numerous stop-loss positions which created a sense of panic among the traders resulting in such a massive sell-off. It was observed that at around 2:00 UTC on May 17, a large order of  3,645 BTC amounting to $26.8 million was executed on Bitstamp, and many believe this triggered the sell-off taking the prices of Bitcoin below $7,000.

Bitcoin is known to drive the cryptocurrency market trends, be it upwards or downwards, so when the Bitcoin was soaring past key resistance levels many altcoins also gained from the Bitcoin movement adding double-digit to their respective market cap, while today’s downfall also prompted many altcoins to drop by 11-20 percent. Be it Ethereum, Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash, all of them lost between 8 to 16 percent.

Among the top 10 altcoins, Ripple’s XRP, XLM, and Cardano were the biggest losers with 16.3, 16.5, 16.7 percent drop respectively. The downfall in prices also resulted in the total market cap of the crypto market falling by a whopping $29 billion.