Major cryptocurrencies fell early Tuesday as investors recovered a bit of steam from a rally that drove digital assets to staggering prices.
The price of bitcoin tumbled about 14 percent to $ 46,605.79 after falling as low as $ 44,964.49 overnight, CoinDesk data shows, which is the biggest daily drop in a month.
Dogecoin, the meme-inspired cryptocurrency that has become an online cult favorite, recently dropped more than 20 percent to about 4.4 cents. And Ether, second in bitcoin in terms of market value, sank nearly 19 percent to $ 1,455.56.
The sale dropped the total value of the cryptocurrency market by about 16 percent to nearly $ 1.4 billion, just days after it reached its highest record, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
Eles Musk, CEO of Tesla – one of Crypto’s key supporters – apparently kicked off the weekend with a tweet declaring that the prices of bitcoin and Ether ‘look high’ even though its electric car maker is $ 1, 5 billion invested in the former coin. .
Markets were also teased on Monday by skeptical remarks by Finance Minister Janet Yellen, who called bitcoin ‘extremely inefficient’ and ‘highly speculative’.
“People need to be careful that it can be extremely volatile and I’m worried about potential losses that investors could suffer,” Yellen reportedly said at a conference.
Tuesday’s tumble underscored the volatility in cryptocurrencies just a week after bitcoin rose above $ 50,000 for the first time.
Cryptoprices have risen over the past few months as a growing number of institutional investors and large companies such as Tesla and Mastercard have begun to treat digital currencies as more common investment assets.
But skeptics have argued that these kinds of wild price fluctuations could be a stumbling block to the broader acceptance of the cryptocurrency.
“The kind of events we’ve seen are not sustainable and only require such withdrawals,” Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, told Reuters.
With Post Wires