Share this article
Market Wrap: A Sea of Red Across Markets as Bitcoin Drops to $9.2K
Bitcoin experienced a dip on Wednesday, but equities and other assets also dropped on an uncertain economic outlook.
Updated Apr 10, 2024, 2:48 a.m. Published Jun 24, 2020, 8:41 p.m.
Bitcoin started the week with a bullish run, but it has now given back all of those gains.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
Bitcoin was trading around $9,296 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET), slipping 3.5% over the previous 24 hours.
At 00:00 UTC on Wednesday (8:00 p.m. Tuesday ET), bitcoin was changing hands around $9,624 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase. Price remained steady until 07:00 UTC (3 a.m. ET) when heavy sell volume sent bitcoin to as low as $9,195. Bitcoin’s price is well below its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, which is a bearish signal for market technicians.
Bearish sentiment is affecting all markets today as investors appear to be de-risking, selling liquid assets for the safety of instruments like cash, said Neil Van Huis, director of institutional trading at liquidity provider Blockfills. “Looks a little risk-offish on all risk assets across the board,”
Read More: Miners Are Sending Bitcoins to Exchanges Again – And That May Be Bearish
Indeed, major stock indices are all in the red Wednesday. In Asia, the Nikkei 225 of publicly traded companies ended the day flat, down 0.07%. Concern about increased coronavirus infection rates in Japan led to some selling pressure. In Europe, the FTSE 100 index dropped 3.1% Wednesday. The prospect of U.S. tariffs on U.K., French, Spanish and German goods dragged the index lower.
The U.S. S&P 500 stock index lost 2.6%. The round of stock selling has been attributed to concerns of the coronavirus pandemic's resurgence in some states.
June hasn’t exactly been a winner for bitcoin so far, but it’s not like stocks were hot either.
As bitcoin dropped Wednesday, traders with long positions on Seychelles-based derivatives exchange BitMEX were forced to liquidate. A spike of over $19 million in total liquidations occurred at 10:00 UTC (6 a.m. ET), exacerbating bitcoin’s price fall. Over the past 24 hours, total liquidations on BitMEX heavily skewed towards the red, with $33 million in sell liquidations versus a mere $406,000 in buy liquidations.
Liquidations on BitMEX are the equivalent of margin calls on conventional exchanges. A “buy liquidation” on a bitcoin contract is when a losing short position is forced to close, requiring purchases of bitcoin. When a “sell liquidation” occurs, those long bitcoin are forced to sell.
“It looks like someone was liquidating positions ahead of the Friday, June 26 option expiration - lifting hedges above $10,000-$11,000 as this is where the heavy portion of strikes lie,” said David Lifchitz, managing partner of ExoAlpha, a crypto quantitative trading firm.
In fact, strikes do favor bitcoin prices over $9,900, according to Skew data, as options traders appear to be making moonshot bets on the world’s oldest cryptocurrency skyrocketing.
The promising growth of the crypto options market is giving traders other alternatives than spot, as that market is closing in on $2 billion in open interest.
Thus, traders can play bitcoin’s volatility through options without having to take on a spot position. “I believe crypto is still somewhat correlated to risk assets and there hasn’t been a ton of overwhelming buy side demand in crypto lately,” Blockfills’ Van Huis said.
Read More: FTX Is Building Lots of Sophisticated Markets Few Traders Use
USDC/USDT trading on DEXes
The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, ether , was down Wednesday, trading around $233 and dipping 4% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).
Trading of the U.S. dollar coin-tether (USDC/USDT) pair on Ethereum’s decentralized exchanges, or DEXes, jumped in June, according to data from Dune Analytics. For the week of June 8, USDC/USDT trading volume was a paltry $3.5 million. The next week, June 15, that number climbed to $131 million in volume.
Speculation on the lender Compound’s token COMP and the arbitrage opportunities surrounding it is the reason for the increase and in USDC/USDT on DEXes, said Peter Chen, a quantitative trader for Hong Kong-based OneBit Quant. “I believe the market was driven up previously with the FOMO on COMP and it was over-hyped.”
Read More: Compound’s COMP Token More Than Doubles in Price Amid DeFi Mania
“However, the market didn’t have enough solid support after the COMP frenzy has dropped,” Chen added. Indeed, this past week's USDC/USDT volume subsided to $10 million, which suggests traders are looking at DeFi opportunities but speculation may ebb and flow based on token popularity.
Other markets
Digital assets on CoinDesk’s big board are in the red Wednesday. Notable losers include zcash dropping 7%, nem (XEM) down 5.6% and lisk (LSK) down 5%. All price changes were as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).
Read More: Argo Buys $500K Worth of Zcash Miners as Bitcoin Revenue Shrivels
In commodities, oil is dipping 5% Wednesday as a barrel of crude was priced at $37.97 at press time.
Gold is holding flat during a day where most assets are lower, down just 0.10% and trading around $1,765 for the day.
Read More: Veteran Commodities Trader Chris Hehmeyer Goes All In on Crypto
U.S. Treasury bonds all slipped Wednesday. Yields, which move in the opposite direction as price, down most on the 10-year, in the red 4.5%.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Japan’s Higher Rates Puts Bitcoin in the Crosshairs of a Yen Carry Unwind
A stronger yen typically coincides with de-risking across macro portfolios, and that dynamic could tighten liquidity conditions that recently helped bitcoin rebound from November’s lows.
What to know:
- The Bank of Japan is expected to raise interest rates to 0.75% at its December meeting, the highest since 1995, affecting global markets including cryptocurrencies.
- A stronger yen could lead to de-risking in macro portfolios, impacting liquidity conditions that have supported bitcoin's recent recovery.
- Governor Kazuo Ueda indicated a high probability of a rate hike, with officials prepared for further tightening if their economic outlook supports it.
Top Stories
