After a week where there were massive gains in crypto currencies with prices reaching massive record highs, Friday morning was a really terrible period for the markets as the falls were incredibly steep reaching down to 35 to 40% as a massive sell off occurred. The biggest loser by far was Bitcoin Cash which saw its value drop by 40% to lows of $1800 (however this is still well above its recent lows of $1200. Bitcoin saw a major decline losing well over 22% to drop to the low $12,000’s – a figure not seen since mid-November. This resulted in a major correction in all the crypto currencies which saw their values dump to well below their previous highs – in some cases by as much as half.
Dash had reached $1600 by Wednesday but its value on Friday morning was well below $1000, a drop of almost 45%. The same could be said for Litecoin which had seen its value climb to $350 on Tuesday but which dropped to lows of $220 – a climb down of well over 30%. Ripple had an incredible day on Thursday reaching a high of $1.20 but then a few hours later the price crashed by 20% to $0.90, an incredible loss of around $.30 in a relatively short space of time. There was talk of Ethereum reaching $1000 by the weekend – the price declined to just over $600 – levels not seen since October. The same could be said for Ethereum Classic which dropped by a similar 25% to levels of $25-27, although these prices were only here a week ago.
Investors and analysts claimed that this deep drop was nothing more than people taking their profits and withdrawing large sums of money from their brokers although the recent hacks into systems could have had some effect on the price. The market cap of all crypto currencies combined was down by over $200 billion to well below $500 billion after it reached $650 billion on Wednesday – a drop of around 30%. However, this blip will only hurt those investors who went into crypto over the past few days or weeks since those who have been in the game long term are still making massive profits. As in these markets, a bull run is followed by a bear and eventually by a bull so there shouldn’t be any sort of panic as yet.
In fact investors such as Dan Moorhead who allegedly bought Bitcoin when it was still trading at around $70 is bullish over the future of the crypto currency. He predicts that in a year, its levels will be far higher than the $12,000 it is currently trading at. Still, the numbers make for rather harrowing reading as Bitcoin actually lost $110 billion in value over just a few days while its price plummeted by 40% when compared to the highs of last Sunday. With other crypto currencies following suit, there could still be a Christmas present coming soon. Most analysts seem to think so.
