Meanwhile the US has unveiled plans to introduce much-needed regulation to the space, and the UK has announced plans to become a crypto hub in order to re-energise its position as a global financial hub in the wake of Brexit. The price of bitcoin has swung wildly over the last 12 months (CoinMarketCap)ĭespite the recent downtrend, Mr Kamerman noted several factors that could shift the momentum and fuel a market-wide recovery.Įl Salvador was recently joined by Central African Republic in adopting bitcoin as a legal form of tender, marking a broader trend of countries introducing laws to encourage the spread of cryptocurrency use. “With cryptocurrency fast gaining legitimacy in the financial world and rising in popularity among hedge funds, we should expect to see cryptocurrencies increasingly mimic the movements of global stock markets,” Michael Kamerman, chief executive of trading platform Killing, told The Independent. With Nasdaq experiencing its sharpest one-day fall since June 2020 this week, it is there fore no surprise that bitcoin and the broader crypto market also took a hit.
With more retail investors onboard than ever, and the increasing integration of existing financial infrastructure that allows institutional investors to join in, crypto has become more in step with the stock market, particularly tech stocks. Reasons for these crashes can range from pandemics to nationwide crackdowns on cryptocurrencies, though more recently they have appeared to line up with movements of traditional markets. Each time it has bounced back to a new all-time high within a couple of years. Over the last decade, bitcoin has fallen in value by 50 per cent or more on six occasions. The obituaries typically coincide with major price corrections, which are then usually followed up by even more major price rallies. A the time bitcoin was worth just over $3,000 – a tenth of its current value. The same publication in 2019 declared cryptocurrencies as “scams”, warning that “anybody who puts any money into them and loses the lot only has themselves to blame”. “Cryptocurrencies face not so much a rapid crash as a slide into nothingness,” it claimed. The death of bitcoin has already been pronounced by the media more than 400 times, according to one site that tracks its obituaries, most recently in a piece in the Spectator titled ‘Crypto is dead’. The cryptocurrency is down more than 50 per cent from the all-time high it experienced just six months ago, with investors fearing that the collapse could be even more severe if a key resistance level is breached in the coming days.īut whichever way it goes from here in the short term, history suggests that it will not be down forever. A bitcoin logo is seen during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on 8 April, 2022 in Miami, Florida (Getty Images)īitcoin has crashed.