Crypto Calamity: Ethereum, Bitcoin Prices Sink as Market Plunges Below $80 Billion
The market downturn picked up speed on Tuesday, as the total cryptocurrency market cap plunged to its lowest point since May. There has since been a slight recovery, although all of the major coins still post 24-hour losses.
On Monday, the total cryptocurrency market cap fell below $90 billion for the first time in July. This market cap evaporation continued on Tuesday, as the total value of all cryptocurrencies plunged as low as $77 billion, a number we have not seen since late May. At present, the market cap is $84 billion.
Bitcoin Price Drops Below $2,400
As eToro wrote yesterday, $2,500 has been an important psychological barrier for the bitcoin price. Unfortunately, the downturn has caused the bitcoin price to slide below that threshold. The bitcoin price followed up Monday’s 4.5% decline with a 3.8% decrease on Tuesday, reducing the current bitcoin price to $2,396. Consequently, bitcoin has seen its market cap fall below $40 billion.
Sheba Jafari of Goldman Sachs recently predicted the correction would continue until the bitcoin price hit about $1,850, at which point it should soar to nearly $4,000.
Ethereum Market Cap Dips Below $20 Billion
Yet again, ethereum’s decline outpaced bitcoin. The ethereum price dropped below $200 on Tuesday; on GDAX, the ethereum price fell as low as $175, its lowest price in more than a month. It has since recovered to $212, but this nevertheless represents a 7% 24-hour decline. For the week, ethereum is down about 27%. At $19.7 billion, ethereum’s current market cap is just over half the size of bitcoin’s.
However, ethereum trading volume did surpass bitcoin to cause the ether token to once again become the most-traded cryptocurrency.
Downturn Pummels Ripple
As one would expect, altcoin prices fell across the board. However, Ripple was the only top-5 coin to post double-digit 24-hour losses, declining 13% for the day. The Ripple price sunk as low as $0.168 before rebounding to its present value of $0.194. Like ethereum, Ripple is down about 27% for the week.
Litecoin and Ethereum Classic performed best among the top altcoins, declining only 2% and 4%, respectively. Daily losses increase as one moves further down the rankings. The Dash price fell 8% to around $175. NEM slid 9% to $0.132. IOTA dove almost 18%, while Monero decreased 8% to drop its price below $40.
BitConnect, whose price declined less than 3%, managed to sneak into the top 10. To achieve that feat, it supplanted EOS and BitShares, each of whom has experienced seven-day price declines of about 50%.
Bitcoin Market Dominance Approaches 50%
The July downturn has enabled bitcoin to steadily increase its market cap dominance, and bitcoin continued to absorb market cap share on Tuesday. At one point, bitcoin dominance rose to 49.6%, although it has since tapered off to about 47%. Ethereum’s share has also fluctuated, but it appears that bitcoin will emerge with a market cap share double the size of ethereum’s.
Ethereum is not the only top coin to shed market cap share this week. Ripple, which steadily controlled about 10% of the market for the past couple months, saw its share fall to about 8.5%.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
