Bitcoin price is back below the psychological $10,000 level after shedding more than $600 in 30 minutes on Wednesday evening August 28th. Starting at 17:50 UTC through 18:20 UTC, the price of the flagship cryptocurrency fell from about $10,200 down to a low of $9,555 on the Luxemburg-based crypto exchange Bitstamp.
That’s a percentage fall of more than 6% in less than an hour which was preceded with a period of relative stability for about two weeks.
The coin is currently trading against the US dollar at the rate of $9,575 per bitcoin. Bitcoin is now down about 13% since its weekly high of $10,955 on August 20th.
Several other coins on the Coinmarketcap list are in the red following Bitcoin’s latest dump. Most of the top 20 coins are registering drops of between 5 and 10% with Tron [TRX], Cardano [ADA] and Binance Coin [BNB] shedding the most in the last 24 hours.
The coins have lost 11.3%, 10.5%, and 10.4% respectively. Ethereum, the leading altcoin by network value has lost about 8% trading at $171 as of press time.
UNUS SED LEO [LEO], the token associated with controversial cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and leading stablecoin Tether is perhaps the best performing token amongst the top 20 coins with relatively modest losses of 3% over the last 24 hours.
Market analysts are associating the Wednesday market slide with futures traders activity. The CME bitcoin futures contract is about to close this Friday which means that some traders could be looking to manipulate the price to get to their price targets.
According to Forbes, futures contracts offer bears a chance to play on the cryptocurrency market and really this was not possible before the advent of the CME product back in 2017.
“It’s not a coincidence Bitcoin tumbled from its all-time high after its CME futures started trading in December 2017. Before then if you didn’t believe in crypto, your only option was to sit on the sidelines,” the Forbes article says.
The fall of the Bitcoin price comes just hours after Bakkt, the NYSE-affiliated bitcoin futures trading platform, announced that it would open its Bitcoin Warehouse for client deposits starting this coming week on September 6th.
Trading on the platform will begin on September 23rd. Bakkt is owned by NYSE parent company ICE and will be offering physically-settled bitcoin futures for institutional investors.
