The crypto markets’ earlier bullish momentum that saw Bitcoin rise to a 2023 high of $25,000 seems to have subsided.
Nairametrics gathered that a total of 58,468 investors liquidated during the trading session, amounting to $158.84 million worth of losses.
Note that the biggest single liquidation order, worth $7.52 million, was placed on Bitmex. The price of bitcoin is adversely impacted when long positions are liquidated without buying pressure from trading volume.
What caused the losses: The Federal Reserve’s potential to continue raising interest rates, higher-than-expected U.S. inflation statistics, and significant long liquidations all seem to contribute to the pause in bullish momentum.
Following a market-wide decline, the price of Bitcoin has decreased, and experts are concerned that the United States Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions will continue to pose a serious threat to the cryptocurrency market.
- In an early attempt to stop the move, bitcoin bulls drove the price back up to over $24K. Around that point, the asset appeared to have stabilized, but the situation changed after the US revealed that the PCE inflation measure had increased by 0.6% for January.
- Bitcoin responded by experiencing a sharp price decline that brought it from $24K to just under $23K. As a result, the asset’s price registered its lowest level in ten days.
Performance of other cryptos: The lowest point this week for Ether would be when it broke below $1,600. S&P 500 futures were down 1.4%, while Nasdaq 100 futures fell 1.9%.
Polygon (MATIC), which had previously experienced one of the largest declines, lost 16.7% this week and is currently trading at $1.27. When word spread that Polygon Labs was laying off 100 workers (20% of its workforce) because of restructuring, MATIC’s slide into oblivion started on Tuesday.
Litecoin, Polkadot, and Cardano all experienced substantial losses for the week, falling by close to 10%.
It wasn’t all bad news though in the crypto market. Stacks (STX) posted gains of more than 80% for the week as it got investors’ attention on reports that it plans to bring the complete functionality of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized applications (DApps), and smart contracts to the Bitcoin blockchain.
In addition, Solana which spent the majority of November and all of December in freefall partly because of its connections to officials from the defunct FTX exchange has also paused its losses since the New Year, with the commodity declining just 1% this week. At the time of writing, it was trading for $22.4.
News of the upcoming migration of the Helium network to Solana and a significantly higher volume of Solana NFT trading were the primary factors in SOL’s success this week.
