Over the weekend, top cryptocurrencies saw their prices plunge even further, which has resulted in a lot of liquidations in the market.
Data from CoinMarketCap showed that Bitcoin’s bearish price action saw it drop to a low of three months at $18,390.
Bitcoin’s drop
The last 24 hours saw Bitcoin shed about 8%, so the leading cryptocurrency was trading hands at $18,440, even though its daily trading volumes had climbed by 64%.
The last week has seen Bitcoin lose about 17% of its value and it has shed about 73% of its value from the all-time high value that it touched in November 2021 at $68,789.63.
The total market cap of the pioneer crypto has lost more than 50%, as it had been about $1.27 trillion last year in November at its peak and it is now $354 billion.
According to Blockchain.com, on Sunday, the difficulty of the Bitcoin Network also reached 32.045t, which is an all-time high.
Network difficulty refers to the computational challenge that miners have to cover for mining a block.
Higher computational power is required when difficulty is greater and this affects the profitability of the miners significantly. This pushes down the price of Bitcoin.
Ethereum drops
The second-largest crypto in terms of market cap, Ethereum saw an 11% decline in just 24 hours, as it fell below $1,300.
On 15th September, Ethereum finally saw ‘The Merge’ happen and since then, it has suffered from losses of 20% in its value. Its total market cap at this time is around $159 billion.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, Ethereum reached an all-time high value in November 2021 at $4,891.70, but it has lost 73.30% since then.
The last 24 hours also saw an 18% decline in Ethereum’s NFT trading volumes, while the monthly decline is around 30%.
Likewise, the past 24 hours have also seen a 12.73% decline in the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi (decentralized finance) applications, which shows that user interest in the space has declined.
Long traders concerned
Due to the bearish price action in the crypto space, about 131,000 traders liquidated $433 million in the last 24 hours.
Of this total, 87%, or $379 million had been long positions, which further highlights the bearish trend of the market.
There were about $173 million liquidations of Ethereum, while $121 million were related to bitcoin during the same period.
The bearish price action of the market is likely because of the expected interest rate hike by the US Federal Reserve later in this week.
According to reports, an increase of 100 basis points is also on the table, after the inflation figures for August turned out to be hotter than expectations.
However, most people are expecting a hike of about 50 to 75 basis points. There were also declines recorded in other leading cryptocurrencies in the market.
A 12% loss was seen in Polkadot, 10% in Avalanche, 10% in Shiba Inu, 12% in Polygon, and 10% in Cardano occurred in the last 24 hours.
