BTC fell to as low as $58,000 amid concerns that the German government was planning to sell off billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency market crashed on Thursday morning as leveraged traders were liquidated en masse.
Bitcoin fell 5% to $57,350, while Ethereum was down 3.5%. Solana and Polkadot also fell 5%.
Nearly all of the top 100 digital assets by market cap fell over the past 24 hours, but Mantra (MANTRA) rose 11%.
The continued decline is due to renewed concerns that the German government may sell its Bitcoin holdings.
Arkham Intelligence reported that German authorities transferred approximately $75 million worth of Bitcoin to Bitstamp, Coinbase and Kraken, one of the largest Bitcoin transfers by the German government to date.
Tron founder Justin Sun has proposed purchasing more than $2.3 billion in Bitcoin held by the German government in an off-exchange transaction to minimize the impact on the cryptocurrency market.
MN Trading CEO Michael van de Poppe believes Bitcoin will test the May 1 low of $56,000. “Altcoin sell-offs and surrenders are happening,” he tweeted.
According to CoinGlass, over 132,000 traders have been liquidated in the past 24 hours, totaling $381 million. Liquidations occur when traders' positions are automatically closed due to a lack of funds to cover losses. The largest single liquidation order was for the ETH-USDT pair on Binance, amounting to $18.5 million.
Meanwhile, US stock markets were closed for Independence Day.
