Why did Bitcoin and the main CRYPTOCURRENCIES fall? / Argentina News

The “aversion to risk”, due to the effects of the omicron variant of the coronavirus and the increase in inflation, were strongly felt this Saturday in the cryptocurrency markets.

In the first hours of the day, in the northern hemisphere, Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with the largest capitalization in the world, fell by more than 20%, to later recover in part and limit the loss to just over 10%.

As reported at 7:30 in the Argentine morning by the CoinMarketCap site, the 3 main cryptocurrencies, measured by capitalization, registered heavy falls and erased tens of billions of dollars of value.

Bitcoin, the largest, with almost $ 900,000 million worth of units in circulation, accumulated a loss of 16.85% in the last 24 hours. Ethereum, the second crypto with the highest value in circulation, with $ 469 billion, a drop of 14.23%. And Binance Coin, the third, whose capitalization slightly exceeds US $ 90,000 million, had lost 13.1% of its value.

Of the 10 cryptocurrencies with the highest value and circulation, all registered falls. The only two in which the loss is slight are Tether and USD Coin, two “stablecoins”, that is, cryptocurrencies backed in dollars, whose retracements are less than 1 percent. Polkadot’s decline exceeded 22%, while Solana, Cardano and Dogecoin, the crypto “meme” that was born as a joke and became popular thanks to comments from Elon Musk, recorded losses of between 17 and 19 percent.

The price of bitcoin thus touched US $ 47,200, 20% below the records of a month ago. Recent fad altcoins such as Shiba Inu fell as much as 14% and on average the global cryptocurrency market capitalization fell to just under $ 2.3 trillion, just over 16% below Friday’s close, as volume of transactions in the last 24 hours totaled just over $ 200 billion.

The Coingecko platform, which includes data on almost 11,400 different crypto assets, specified that the total capitalization of the cryptocurrencies it tracks together fell almost 15%, to $ 2.34 trillion. It should be remembered that in the first half of November, when bitcoin reached a record of US $ 69,000 (on November 10), the crypto capitalization had reached over US $ 3 billion.

Beyond possible speculative maneuvers and “profit taking” by some big players, the fall reflects the nervousness of world markets due to the possible effect on the economy of the omicron variant of the coronavirus and the expected increases in the interest rate in the United States and by the world’s major central banks, in reaction to rising inflation, which would weaken commodity prices and could lead to an international recession.

Black week

In fact, the crypto crash came after a negative week in major markets and indicators. The Nasdaq fell 3% and the S&P 500 2%.

One of the triggers of the negative mood and the over-reaction of the markets was the report of Friday from the data office on the labor market for November: at the end of the month, the North American economy added 210,000 new jobs, less than half of the 550,000 anticipated by Refinitiv’s survey of economists.

The effects of the omicron variant and rising inflation were strongly felt in the crypto markets

Although this figure was lower than expected, the unemployment rate in the United States fell to its lowest level since the beginning of the pandemic and investors interpreted that now the Federal Reserve (Central Bank) of the United States will be more willing to adjust monetary, to control inflation risks.

In this context, the shares of companies so far favored fell, such as Tesla, Etsy and Adobe, which lost more than 5% of their value. Facebook, meanwhile, lost 1.1% on Friday and more than 20% from its September high.

On Saturday, finally, these developments impacted, with an increase, in the crypto world.

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