Bitcoin Falls Below $18,000, Ethereum Under $900 as Selloff Intensifies

Just after 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, Bitcoin finally fell below $20,000. One hour later, Ethereum followed it down and fell below $1,000. Those figures were seen as much-dreaded key support levels for the top two coins by market cap.

But by 5:15 a.m. EST, both began to slowly climb back, appearing to avoid the immediate precipitous slide many predicted would happen if $20,000 and $1,000 were breached. Some may have hoped $18,979 and $987 would be the lows of this crash.

No such luck: things got worse again around noon. Bitcoin and Ethereum took another dramatic leg lower, with BTC going to $17,772 at 4:30 p.m. EST on CoinMarketCap, and ETH to $898 at 4:15 p.m.

The current Crypto Winter is different from 2018 in that crypto is tanking along with tech stocks as the broader economy looks shaky, inflation is ballooning, and a full-on recession looks imminent.

As crypto believers look for the bottom (and some wait to buy back in), things could get much worse before they get better.

The carnage has been highlighted by a series of crypto firm failures or alarms about insolvency, from Celsius freezing withdrawals to Babel Finance doing the same, to investors pulling out of Three Arrows Capital. Grayscale's GBTC is trading at an all-time discount to the spot price of Bitcoin.

Kraken growth marketing director and Bitcoin influencer Dan Held declared on Saturday, "We are on the path of maximum pain." Antoni Trenchev, founder of crypto lender Nexo, said on Bloomberg on Friday that the current crash "reminds me, quite frankly, of the 1907 bank panic."