BTC Drops Below $25,000 As XRP, ADA Lead Crypto Declines
Cryptocurrencies fell on Thursday with bitcoin (BTC) falling below $25,000 and XRP and Cardanos ada (ADA) extending 24-hour falls to as much as 7.4%. Total market cap lost 3.8% in the last 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows.
Further declines could be in store, with some traders suggesting that bitcoin could fall as low as $23,500 based on price chart analysis.
“Bitcoin has retreated to local resistance levels from August of last year to February of this year,” Alex Kuptsikevich, a senior market analyst at trading firm FxPro, said in an email to CoinDesk. “The bulls may try to hold the selloff near this level, but the current decline remains within the descending channel that has been in place since April.”[ads1];
A descending channel refers to a bearish trend in any asset characterized by prices making lower highs on short-term time frames.
“More significant support for bitcoin is near the 200-day average – now at $23.6K and pointing higher,” Kuptsikevich added.
ADA’s fall means it has fallen more than 20% in the past week after being named along with 12 other tokens as collateral in a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase.
XRP erased all gains from a rally earlier this week as markets digested the “Hinman emails” from a Ripple Labs filing on Tuesday. The emails of William Hinman, a former director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, were released to the public in connection with the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple.
Ether (ETH), meanwhile, had a 6.4% 24-hour drop, while ether-tracked futures delivered the highest liquidations among the majors at $57 million out of a total of $143 million across all crypto-tracked futures.
Liquidation refers to when an exchange forcefully closes a trader’s leveraged position due to a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial margin. It occurs when a trader is unable to meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position, meaning they do not have enough funds to keep the trade open. Large liquidations can signal the local top or bottom of a steep price movement, which can allow traders to position accordingly.
USDT balances on Curve’s popular 3pool, a stablecoin exchange pool consisting of USDT, USDC and DAI, rose to over 72% early Thursday, suggesting traders had swapped tens of millions of USDT for USD coins (USDC) and dai (DAI). ).
