Bitcoin suffered a nasty correction after coming within inches of breaking $50,000 for the first time.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Bitcoin hit record highs on Valentine’s Day,
And suffered a nasty correction too.
The weekend was dominated by a bullish surge upwards for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, which managed to hit highs of $49,487.64 on Feb. 14.
But unfortunately for optimistic pundits who have repeatedly predicted that Bitcoin is about to crack $50,000, a dramatic drop soon followed. Within hours, BTC tumbled 6.34% to lows of $46,347.48 — taking some traders by surprise.
The sell-offs were more pronounced in the altcoin markets. Ether briefly tumbled to lows of $1,683.91, but later managed to recover lost ground and return to $1,823.41. Some coins with a smaller market cap dropped by up to 30%.
Pepperstone’s head of research Chris Weston told Reuters said that BTC’s sudden pullback from $50,000 might have been caused by one or two big funds deciding to cash out and take profit:
“The big question is: OK, you want to buy the pullback, but how big is the pullback that we are talking about?”
National holidays in major Asian markets to bring in the Lunar New Year wouldn’t have helped matters, as this would have contributed to lower trading volumes.
Bitcoin has started to recover from this sharp correction. At the time of writing, prices stood at $48,225.92 — with a market cap of $896,759,446,035.
It’s also interesting to note that Bitcoin’s dominance — its percentage of the total market cap of cryptocurrencies — has continued to slide over the past month. This stood at 68.3% in mid-January, but has now slipped to 60.3% as the likes of Cardano, XRP, Polkadot, Binance Coin and Litecoin outperformed over the past seven days.
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