The price of Bitcoin has retraced to August 2nd levels around the sub $10k after experiencing an 8% drop on Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning.
On Luxemburg-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp, the currency fell from an intraday range of $11,400, its opening price on Tuesday to close the day at $10,862. However, the price slid further down on Wednesday morning to a low of $10,471.
As of press time, the leading coin is trading in the mid-$10k range. Bitcoin has corrected from a high of $12,325 last seen on August 6th which represents a fall of about 15% in less than a week.
The coin has, however, maintained its market dominance at the 68% level since most of the altcoin market has followed its sharp piece correction. Most of the top 20 altcoins are in the red which Monero seeing the biggest loses over the last 24 hours.
The coin has lost 6.94 which is around what bitcoin has lost. Following up is Binance exchange coin BNB which is down about 4.1%. Ethereum, the leading altcoin is down a percentage point as its downtrend continues. The rest of the prominent coins are seeing losses in the 1-3% range.
However, there are still coins in the green despite the bitcoin precipitation. Bitcoin Cash, a leading fork of bitcoin together with Chainlink are enjoying gains of 4.25% and 5.91% in the last 24 hours respectively. The coins are ranked in the 4th and 16th positions on Coinmarketcap respectively.
The overall market cap, which mainly trails the bitcoin price action is also down about 4% falling from Tuesday’s high of $295.4 billion to Wednesday’s morning low of $280.5 billion. Similar to bitcoin, the market cap has also maintained a tight range for the most part over the last month between the $250 and $300B marks.
The bitcoin price fall may have been triggered by the negative news on Monday that saw the US SEC postpone further its decision on the proposed rule change to allow the establishment of a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
The financial regulator pushed the decision for proposals made by Bitwise Asset Management and VanEck/SolidX to October 13th and 18th respectively while the third proposal by Wilshire Phoenix was pushed to September 29th. Wilshire Phoenix’s proposal was filed much recent than the other two and therefore the SEC has the option to postpone its ruling further but in regards to the first two, the SEC has exhausted its delay options.
On or before these dates, the SEC will have to either deny or accept the rule change proposals.
