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An early Saturday morning slide saw Ethereum slip below its key support level of $1,000 and Bitcoin fall as low as $18,905, representing significant new lows in already bearish crypto market, according to CoinMarketCap.
Ethereum dropped precipitously from $1,076 to $986 in less than two hours.
Bitcoin is down nearly 10% in 24 hours, and continues to hover below the $20,000 mark at the time of writing. The last time Bitcoin was in the $19,000 range was December 2020. Back then, hitting $19,450 was good news, framed as a "surge" tied to proposed U.S. regulation of stablecoins.
The top two "blue chip" cryptocurrencies are now below their largely symbolic barriers—$20,000 for Bitcoin and $1,000 for Ethereum. Still, breaching these thresholds could trigger a wave of "forced liquidations" that could in turn drive prices down even further.
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If these levels break, $20k $BTC & $1k $ETH, we can expect massive sell pressure in the spot markets as dealers hedge themselves. We can also expect that there will be some otc dealers and that will be unable to hedge properly and might go belly up.
Even more notably, Bitcoin today fell below its December 2017 high of $19,834—the peak of the last bull run, which began when BTC broke through $1,000 on New Year's Day of that year. In prior bear markets, Bitcoin had never fallen below the peak of its prior bull run.
Ethereum first saw $1,000 in January 2018, then lost it in when Crypto Winter hit in February 2018. After it regained that mark in January of last year, it had never fallen below $1,000 until now.
Investors and analysts continue to scan for the bottom. Swan Bitcoin Analyst Sam Callahan has said that Bitcoin could drop as low as $13,800, representing a fall of more than 80% from its all-time high in November 2021. The same thing happened in December 2018, when Bitcoin nearly dipped to $3,000.
The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently stands at around $835 billion, down over 7% in the last 24 hours.
That's a far cry from 221 days ago, when headlines declared a crypto market cap of $3 trillion. The price of BTC was $66,362 then, with Ethereum hitting $4,782. As the bear market worsens, crypto investors will seek a bottom to get back in.
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