Bitcoin falls below $19,000 as cryptos creak under rate hike risk

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SINGAPORE — Cryp­tocur­ren­cies fell to fresh lows on Mon­day on reg­u­la­to­ry con­cerns and as investors glob­al­ly turned shy on risky assets with inter­est rate ris­es loom­ing around the world.

Bit­coin, the biggest cryp­tocur­ren­cy by mar­ket val­ue, fell about 5% to a three-month low of $18,387.

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Ether, the sec­ond largest cryp­tocur­ren­cy, dropped 3% to a two-month low of $1,285 and is down more than 10% in the last 24 hours. Most oth­er small­er tokens were deep­er in the red.

The Ethereum blockchain, which under­pins the ether token, had a major upgrade over the week­end called the Merge that changes the way trans­ac­tions are processed and cuts ener­gy use.

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The token’s val­ue has fall­en amid some spec­u­la­tion that remarks last week from U.S. Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion Chair­man Gary Gensler implied the new struc­ture could attract extra reg­u­la­tion. Trades around the upgrade also were unwound.

“It’s spec­u­la­tion as to what might or might not hap­pen,” said Matthew Dibb, COO of Sin­ga­pore cryp­to plat­form Stack Funds, on the reg­u­la­to­ry outlook.

“A lot of the hype has come out of the mar­kets since the Merge,” he said. “It’s real­ly been a sell-the-news type of event,” he added, giv­en the ner­vous glob­al back­drop, and said ether could test $950 in com­ing months.

“Look­ing at the land­scape right now, both fun­da­men­tal­ly and tech­ni­cal­ly, it’s not look­ing great. There’s no imme­di­ate bull­ish cat­a­lyst that we can see that’s going to prop up these mar­kets and bring in a whole lot of new mon­ey and liquidity.”

(Report­ing by Tom West­brook; Edit­ing by Kirsten Donovan)

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