Crypto
Bitcoin Prices Fell Below $58,000 As Various Factors Fueled Losses
Bitcoin prices have fallen back after approaching $65,000. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
Bitcoin prices have suffered some notable declines over the last few days, dropping from nearly $65,000 to less than $58,000 as multiple variables have combined to push the cryptocurrency lower.
The digital currency, the world’s largest by total market value, fell to roughly $57,850 today, according to Coinbase data provided by TradingView.
The cryptocurrency declined to this level after rising to more than $64,800 on August 25, additional Coinbase figures from TradingView reveal.
The digital asset has since recovered some of these losses, trading close to $59,100 at the time of this writing.
‘Strong’ Technical Resistance
After reaching its loftiest value in roughly three weeks on August 25, bitcoin may have changed course and started trending lower as a result of encountering significant technical resistance close to the $64,000 level, according to Julio Moreno, head of research for CryptoQuant.
“The selling could have been triggered by technical factors as the price found resistance around the $64K mark, which is the On-chain trader’s realized price, a key technical level,” he stated.
The chart below depicts this on-chain realized price along with the corresponding profit or loss:
Bitcoin’s on-chain realized price, along with its profit or loss
Robust Exchange Inflows
On August 26, when bitcoin was already heading lower, a significant amount of the cryptocurrency flowed onto spot exchanges, according to additional CryptoQuant data.
The substantial movement of the digital currency onto these marketplaces, which happened again on August 27, signalled selling pressure, Moreno noted.
The chart below illustrates these movements:
Bitcoin inflows to spot exchanges
These developments helped accelerate bitcoin’s downward movement, he claimed.
Long Squeeze
The decline in bitcoin caused a long squeeze, meaning that many traders had to liquidate their long positions as the cryptocurrency fell in value.
Steven Lubka, head of Swan Private at Swan Bitcoin, singled this out as a major contributor to the notable decline the digital asset suffered over the last several days, clarifying this via email.
The chart below illustrates the sharp increase in liquidations that took place on August 27:
Bitcoin long liquidations
Nvidia Results
Another major factor that analysts singled out as having an impact on bitcoin’s recent price movements was the market’s response to the latest financial results issued by chipmaker Nvidia Corporation, which trades under the ticker symbol NVDA.
Tim Enneking, managing partner of Psalion, commented on these results, as well as the impact they had on a wide range of risk assets.
“As for today’s specific move, it’s correlated with fiat markets and the outlandish expectations for Nvidia revenue and profit – which exceeded predictions in all cases, but didn’t blow out the high end of the various analysts’ ranges,” he stated via email.
“So it’s down 8% (as of this writing) in after-market trading and has been dragging every risk-on market down for the past 24 hours or so because of ‘fear’ of precisely these results,” Enneking added.
Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, ether, EOS and SOL.
Crypto
Cryptocurrency platforms need better clarity to avoid being a petri dish for antisemitism – opinion
Since the infamous October 7 attacks, antisemitism has exploded and adapted in its virus-like tendencies, finding new ways to achieve popularity by infecting and leeching onto other elements of emerging pop culture. Cryptocurrency, as explained below, is just the latest example.
As cryptocurrency platforms ascend in popularity, they must exercise better moral clarity to avoid becoming a petri dish for bigotry and violence, particularly against Jews.
Cryptocurrency remains a relatively new phenomenon, yet one that is becoming increasingly integrated into monetary markets around the world.
In 2021, El Salvador became the first country to adopt a cryptocurrency as legal tender when it embraced Bitcoin as a source of official currency. As Bitcoin has risen to prominence, other cryptocurrencies have emerged into the mainstream conscience, including meme coins.
While some meme coins are relatively harmless (such as the world-famous Dogecoin), others have sought to capitalize on blatant antisemitism, racism, and violence in their titles and accompanying thumbnails. Also concerning is that some of these coins are even receiving heightened exposure from large platforms such as pump.fun, which reportedly commands a net valuation estimated at over a billion dollars.
Pump has clear terms and conditions that prohibit abusive and obscene messages and reserve the company the right to remove such content. Nevertheless, it continues to platform it. Normalizing malign antisemitism, racism, and violence has severe and deadly consequences. As one of cryptocurrency’s largest trading platforms, Pump has a moral duty. It must discontinue its practice of capitalizing off tokens that normalize bigotry and violence.
According to Article 3.2 of Pump’s Terms and Conditions, users “must not post, upload or publish to the Pump Platform any abusive, defamatory, dishonest, or obscene message” and may face “termination of or restrictions on the availability of the Pump Platform” for any violations. Article 20.2 also affords Pump the “sole and absolute discretion to remove, modify, or reject any content.”
Despite having the mandate and authority to combat bigotry and promotions of violence on its platform, Pump is arguably helping monetize them. Many of its controversial tokens have achieved King of the Hill (KH) status. Tokens with KH status are tokens with the highest market cap. As a result, Pump rewards KH tokens with heightened visibility, featuring them on its homepage.
Tokens with antisemitic conspiracies
Many tokens that have appeared on Pump’s homepage with KH status include antisemitic themes and conspiracies. These include the following: “JewNazi” (accompanied by a thumbnail of a Star of David and a swastika inside), “Dirty F***ing Jew” (accompanied by a thumbnail of the Happy Merchant on a coin); “Jews did 911;” and “Jew” (captioned with Jews in Control).
Other tokens deploy Hinduphobic themes. One token, for example, titled “Jews vs. Hindus,” appears alongside a thumbnail of two Happy Merchants – one dressed in Jewish attire and the other in purported Hindu garb with a Nazi armband – chained to one another. The token is captioned with the following description: “They’re both literally the same, they s*** on everything, invade everything, destroy the economy and housing.”
Racism expressed against Black people is also prevalent throughout the platform. Multiple tokens explicitly invoke the “N-word,” and some call for the death of Black people or call upon users to “pump” tokens to kill them.
Other coins, such as “Monkey Wars,” employ other derogatory, anti-Black themes. Some coins even glorify the Ku Klux Klan, bearing thumbnails depicting a clansman alongside a description, “We are still here to protect you. Protect yourself and support us today.” The effect of these coins is clearly to gamify, glorify, and even normalize expressions of violence against black people.
Pump has also platformed tokens that appear to promote extortion and torture. One token, for example, reads, “LIVE REAL TORTURE UNTIL 100M MC (TORTURE).”
By allowing such tokens to feature on its platform, and occasionally on its very homepage, Pump has become tacitly complicit in promoting their obscene messaging. As one of the biggest cryptocurrency trading platforms, Pump must clear its portfolio once and for all of the bigoted and violent content, especially antisemitic vitriol, within its ranks.
The writer is an attorney and the director of policy education at StandWithUs, an international nonpartisan education organization that combats antisemitism and misinformation about Israel.
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned Californians on Monday of the proliferation of fraudulent cryptocurrency websites, which are sometimes referred to as pig-butchering scams.
Bonta also vowed to continue to protect consumers from scams, which are often carried out by international scammers who are difficult to prosecute and arrest.
Bonta also announced in a news release the shutting down of 42 fake crypto websites by the California Department of Justice that scammed innocent victims out of at least $6.5 million. Each victim lost an average of $146,306.
“As scammers grow increasingly sophisticated and calculated, so must our enforcement,” Bonta said. “Scammers can use deception and emotional manipulation to take advantage of people looking for connection. While there is much work to be done, I want to take a moment to celebrate the hard work of my team, who took action to protect consumers by shutting down 42 fake cryptocurrency websites last year. I would also like to thank our state partners at the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation for their collaboration. I urge Californians to be vigilant and protect their finances: Do not send money to anyone you have never met in person.”
In a pig-butchering scheme, a victim receives a random text or message on social media and builds trust with the scammer. Then they are directed to a website to invest money that at first, will show their investment rapidly increasing. Eventually, when victims try to withdraw their funds, they won’t receive anything and the scammers will walk away with their money.
The DOJ has identified 10 red flags that Californians should watch out for, including:
- Impossible rates of return
- No contact information
- The use of stolen or borrowed images
- The use of stolen dialog and written content
- Address does not exist or is a bad location
- The offer prizes or bonuses
- Inconsistent phone numbers and addresses
- Websites tha have not been recently updated
- Bad grammar and translation
- Not on industry listings of exchanges such as CoinMarketCap.com
Those who believe they have been a victim of a scam, are asked to report the incident to local law enforcement agency and the following agencies:
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Bitcoin fell on Monday as volatility in the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency continues following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to create a strategic bitcoin reserve for the United States.
Bitcoin was trading at $81,712, down over 5% but off earlier lows, at 9:42 a.m. Singapore time, according to Coin Metrics.
The reserve will be funded by coins that have been seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases and there are no plans for the U.S. government to buy more bitcoin. After the strategic reserve announcement last Thursday, crypto prices declined as investors were disappointed it wasn’t a more aggressive program.
Other cryptocurrency prices also dropped on Monday. Both ether and XRP were down about 7.5% at around 9:43 a.m. Singapore time.
Some investors, however, said the move to establish a reserve was bullish in the long-term.
“I absolutely think the market has this wrong,” Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. “The market is short-term disappointed” that the government didn’t say it was immediately going to start acquiring 100,000 or 200,000 bitcoin, he added.
Hougan pointed towards comments on X from White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks, who said the U.S. would look for “budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”
“I think the right question to ask is: did this executive order make it more likely that in the future, bitcoin will be a geopolitically important currency or asset? Will other governments look to follow the U.S.’s lead and build their own strategic reserve? And to me, the answer to that is emphatically yes,” Hougan said.
“The reason that questions matters is that’s the question that determines if bitcoin is $80,000 a coin or $1 million a coin.”
Hougan called the decline in crypto prices a “short-term setback.”
“I think the market will soon find its footing and realize that actually this is incredibly bullish long term for this asset and for crypto as a whole,” he said.
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