The landscape in the cryptocurrency market continues to look dim, with bitcoin falling to overcome $55,000. The altcoins also struggle as Ethereum is close to breaking below $4,000, while Polkadot dumped by another 6% in a day.
Bitcoin Suffers Below $55K
It’s safe to say that bitcoin has seen better days, which weren’t all that long ago. The cryptocurrency challenged the coveted $60,000 mark on Friday before a sudden price dump, perhaps prompted by fears of a new COVID-19 variant, drove it south hard.
In just a matter of minutes, the asset lost more than $6,000 of value and bottomed at $53,500, causing nearly $400 million of liquidations in an hour.
This became the most severe price crash since September. Since then, BTC has attempted to recover some ground and even exceeded $55,000 on a few occasions but was stopped in its tracks.
As of now, bitcoin trades just over $54,000, and its market capitalization is close to dropping below $1 trillion.
Alts See Red Again
Similarly to bitcoin, most alternative coins have suffered severely in the past few days. Ethereum, for example, traded above $4,500 before the correction drove it south to under $4,000.
After an unsuccessful attempt to challenge $4,200, the second-largest crypto is now slightly over $4,000.
The rest of the larger-cap alts are in a similar condition. Binance Coin (-3%), Solana (-4.5%), Cardano (-4%), Ripple (-4%), Dogecoin (-3.5%), Avalanche (-4%), and CRO (-4.5%) are all in red.
Polkadot has lost the most value in a day. Another 6% dump has driven DOT to $33.
The cryptocurrency market capitalization is just over $2.5 trillion on CoinGecko. This means that it’s down by more than $500 billion in a few weeks since it exceeded $3 trillion for the first time.
