Bitcoin fell below $41,000 and Ethereum fell below $2,200 as crypto markets tumbled on Monday after rallying for the better part of two months.
Bitcoin is currently $40,758, down 7% in the past day. This comes after $330 million in crypto futures contracts had already been liquidated on the market on Monday morning as BTC fell below $43,000. According to CoinGlass, the total amount liquidated now stands at $516 million.
Still, the one-day drop is relative. It is still 5% higher than at the beginning of the month when BTC was trading at $38,688. The same goes for Ethereum. Ethereum is down 7% since yesterday and is currently trading at $2,185. According to CoinGecko, this is 7% higher than the value at the beginning of the month.
The global cryptocurrency market capitalization, which hovered around $1 trillion for much of this year, now stands at $1.6 trillion, down 6% from yesterday.
Elsewhere in the market, alternative investors were in trouble. ORDI (ORDI), which saw explosive growth last week and hit an all-time high of $68.37, has fallen 14% over the past day. This token is the most popular BRC-20 token built on Bitcoin's Ordinals protocol and is currently trading at $45.11.
Pepecoin (PEPE), which soared 26% last week during a surge in meme coin activity, has also cooled. As of this writing, it is trading at $0.00000138, down 13% over the past day.
Despite some of the biggest digital assets by market capitalization taking a hit, there is also good news for some alternatives.
A new report from digital asset management firm CoinShares finds that institutional investors are paying particular attention to Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX). An exchange-traded product aimed at tracking the two coins saw $5 million worth of deposits last week. And while most gaming token categories were in the red on Monday, Immutable (IMX) saw his 10% rise.
Meanwhile, dollar-pegged stablecoin Binance USD (BUSD) lost its peg for a while on Monday. According to CoinGecko, BUSD has fallen to $0.97 at the time of writing. Although it is a deprecated stablecoin, there are still approximately 1.4 billion tokens in circulation.
One possible reason for the price movement is that most of the BUSD margin trades and futures contracts were automatically terminated today, according to a Binance blog post.
BUSD has been in a steady decline since the SEC sent a notice of wells to Paxos, a New York-based company that handled the minting and redemption of BUSD on behalf of crypto exchange Binance. Paxos and Binance then announced that users can continue to redeem their tokens until February 2024.
According to the exchange, BUSD tokens that are not redeemed before Binance stops supporting them will be automatically converted to FDUSD, a stablecoin issued by FD121 Ltd.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
