WASHINGTON: Tuesday saw a spike in selling that slammed cryptocurrencies and other risky assets like stocks, causing Bitcoin to plummet as much as 6.5%, marking the greatest one-day decline in the past two weeks.
After hitting a two-week low of $62,966, the price was down 5.86 percent at $63,419, and ether sank 6.39 percent to $3,283.
With investors flooding US exchange-traded funds backed by spot bitcoin, bitcoin is still up 52% on the year thus far.
In addition to some profit-taking, the price reached a record high of around $74,000 on Thursday of last week. A number of US data releases also hinted that the Federal Reserve might not reduce interest rates as much as previously believed.
Over the past week, ether has lost 13 percent due to an upgrade to the underlying Ethereum network, while bitcoin has dropped by almost 9 percent, marking the largest weekly decline since last September. Performance, however, has not been as poor throughout the entire crypto complex.
Galaxy Asset Management, a subsidiary of cryptocurrency startup Galaxy Digital, announced on Monday that as of the end of February, there were $10.1 billion in provisional assets under management. This represents a 24.8 percent growth from the previous month, mostly due to market appreciation, the company claimed.
Smaller tokens, sometimes referred to as “altcoins,” have attracted interest of their own. According to Coingecko, the avalanche avax coin increased by 17 percent, while the sol token on the solana network gained 19 percent in the most recent week.
