Bitcoin's Price Decline Sparks Flywheel Effect in Crypto Markets

The price of Bitcoin took a dive during June 20th from a high of $737 USD at 23:00 UTC and has floored to $666 at press time on Bitcoin.com’s Kaiko index.

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Some are blaming the Bitfinex outage, which took place on June 20th’s overnight into the morning of June 21. Some are still shook up over the debacle of Ethereum and the DAO, which took place last week.

Bitcoin Dumps Well Below $700 and Looks Bearish

There could be multiple reasons the price has dropped so low, as the cryptocurrency world had an eventful run last week.

Currently, most of the blame has been pointed at one large exchange for having network issues and “major outages.” Headquartered in Hong Kong, the popular trading platform Bitfinex closed shop twice and was down for hours.

It is possible that, due to the increase in bitcoin’s value and the recent DAO attack, the Bitfinex blunder got people scared, leading some to dump their coins on the market.

Bitfinex stated during the incident:

“We believe that internal networking issues between our servers have been resolved, allowing us to reliably run the backend systems, including the trading engine. External connectivity issues remain, however, which may result intermittent unresponsiveness as our hosting provider continues to work on the problem.”

However, while everyone points to Bitfinex’s technical difficulties, the price really started following a bearish pattern since the DAO incident.

While the value of bitcoin was on an upward trend, trying to break the $800 USD range, the attack on Ethereum’s popular DAO drained 3.6 million Ether from its coffers.

Immediately following the attack, all cryptocurrency markets took a small hit, with the DAO tokens and Ether market taking the brunt of the storm.

The morning after the DAO incident, bitcoin started to rise again. It kept a solid pace at $740-$760 during the next 24 hours, but the charts looked bearish, and signs suggested an approaching decline.

As Ethereum’s market capitalization dropped below the $1 billion mark, it seemed as though a lot of the money was flowing into BTC. But that has since changed with a significant drop, leaving bitcoin at a 12 percent depreciation since the high.

Bitfinex reopened on the afternoon of June 21, but charts still indicate that people are shorting the market, and most alternative cryptocurrencies are feeling the blow.

What is interesting at present is that most of the top twenty cryptocurrencies are down in value. This includes Litecoin, which was holding stable for a while now, and Dash, Ripple, NEM, Doge, and Lisk.

Now, besides 95 percent of the top twenty tokens being down, both Ethereum and the DAO are up in value against the U.S. dollar. At press time, Ether is sitting at over $12 USD and the DAO is inching slowly up at 8 cents per token.

No one knows why the dump is happening, and at the end of this writing, Bitcoin has sunk to another low of $639 USD per BTC. Charts are looking dreary with enormous red candles and sell orders look massive on the depth charts at the moment.

Bitcoin.com will be following the price like Sherlock Holmes for our readers, searching for clues to all of the memorable times here in crypto-land.

What do you think about Bitcoin’s downturn in value against the U.S. dollar? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Kaiko, Bitfinex, Pixabay, and Crypto-graphics.com.