It’s a Black Friday sale right across the crypto market right now, as renewed Covid concerns put the fear into traditional markets, creating a knock-on effect to the digital-asset space.
As reported by Stockhead’s Nick Sundich, the ASX plunged more than 1.7% on Friday – its third week in a row of declines, and its biggest drop since October 1.
It comes amid uncertainty about a new coronavirus variant reportedly detected in Botswana, South Africa and Hong Kong, which may be vaccine resistant.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the US stock markets when they open. They were closed for trading on Thanksgiving Thursday, but are set to open at the normal time on Black Friday – 9.30am EST (1.30am AEDT) – and close in a shortened day of trading at 1pm EST (5am AEDT).
As far as the crypto market is concerned, is this a fresh new wave of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to deal with in what’s been an unpredictable month, not quite sticking to the “Moonvember” plan? Seems so. The market has certainly reacted negatively after it appeared Bitcoin was gearing up for a potential break back beyond US$60k again.
But, remember what happened after news of Covid-19 first broke the mainstream and dipped the markets back in March, 2020? Here’s a quick refresher on Bitcoin’s history since then.
The crisis-era stimulus injections haven’t played out too badly for Bitcoin and crypto. That said, there have been rumblings of the US Federal Reserve accelerating tapering and raising interest rates from January 2022. An unwinding of stimulus wouldn’t necessarily work well for Bitcoin’s inflation-hedge narrative.
Hang on… just in… we’re getting some breaking, expert analytical market reactions to today’s dip…
At the time of writing, the entire crypto market valuation has taken a 5.5% hit, dropping to US$2.58 trillion, according to CoinGecko. The general overview is a sea of red. Oh look… there’s some gree… nope, that’s a stablecoin… Damn.
Let’s have a look a some of the biggest bleeders in the top 100 just now, then. Some notable ones include: Solana (SOL) -10%; Cardano (ADA) -9%; XRP, -10%; Polkadot (DOT) -11%; Avalanche (AVAX) -18%; Crypto.com (CRO) -18%; Decentraland (MANA) -16%; Fantom (FTM) -16%; Loopring (LRC) -17%; and Immutable X (IMX) (-17%).
Strangely, though, Basic Attention Token (BAT), ranked no. 76 on CoinGecko, is up about 18% since this time yesterday.