The world’s flagship crypto recovered partly from its precarious fall on Wednesday, after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Elon Musk weighed in on Bitcoin’s recent rally.
Bitcoin at one point lost about $13,000 in value after dropping from its all-time high of $58,330.57 to $45,290.59 within the span of two days.
Bitcoin’s deep sell-off appeared to decelerate as prices settled around $49,000 after the flagship crypto-asset logged its steepest two-day loss since March 2020.
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At the time of writing this report, Bitcoin traded at $49,486.36 with a daily trading volume of $108.5 billion.
Bitcoin is still by far the most valuable crypto asset, with a market value of $922.3 billion.
Bitcoin bulls exhaustion came into play over the weekend when Elon Musk, the world’s second-richest man, disclosed that the price of the leading two cryptos seemed to be in overbought territory.
The leader of the world’s most valuable electric car maker was replying to Peter Schiff — a highly revered gold hedge fund manager who is popularly known for his strong bias against crypto assets and has always believed that gold is much better than Bitcoin and fiat money.
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Compounding the woes of bitcoin bulls, the world’s most powerful financial leader, Janet Yellen, took sides with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) some days ago, by warning investors and the public of the dangers of owning Bitcoin.
The U.S Treasury Secretary and custodian of the $20 trillion economic juggernauts, raised her concern that the world’s most popular crypto asset could be ideal for money laundering and illicit transactions.
“I don’t think that bitcoin … is widely used as a transaction mechanism,” she told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at a DealBook conference. “To the extent, it is used I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.”
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Yellen raised concerns about its usual high price swings that often come to cost some investors their fortune.
“It is a highly speculative asset and you know I think people should be aware it can be extremely volatile and I do worry about potential losses that investors can suffer,” Yellen said.
