With the release of the most recent budget from United States President Joe Biden and the failure of the crypto-bank Silvergate, both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have experienced a decline of 8% over the past 24 hours. For the first time in nearly two months, Bitcoin’s price fell below $20,000 during the last 24 hours. According to the statistics provided by CoinMarketCap, the price of Bitcoin fell to a low of $19,920 on March 10.
Bitcoin got off to a fantastic start in 2023, but on March 3, amid the uncertainty caused by Silvergate, it dropped as much as 5% in an hour. Since then, it would appear that the price has been unable to move higher. Meanwhile, ETH, the market’s second-largest cryptocurrency, has followed a similar negative pattern, as the cryptocurrency’s value has decreased by 8% in the last day and 10% in the past week.
The price of ETH has fallen to a three-week low of $1,379, which is roughly 70% below the historic high of $4,878 reached by the cryptocurrency in November 2021. During the same time period, the value of a number of altcoins has decreased by an even greater amount. Following Solana (SOL), which has had the largest percentage loss over the period and is currently trading at $16.23, are Polygon (MATIC) and Litecoin (LTC), which have experienced losses of 8.5% and 9.3%, respectively.
Why is the Market Crashing?
Despite the fact that the persistent volatility constantly produces fluctuations in price, the cryptocurrency market has experienced particularly poor performance over the past several days in particular. In his most recent speech, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, discussed the possibility of increasing interest rate hikes in the years to come.
In addition to that, United States Vice President Joseph Biden included a discussion of cryptocurrency in the fiscal plan for the year 2024. Biden proposed the implementation of a new cryptocurrency tax of 30% on the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining and the prohibition of wash trading in the crypto market. This tax would begin at 10% for the first year, and then gradually climb to 30% over the course of time.
As if things couldn’t get much worse for the crypto industry, Silvergate Bank made the announcement on Wednesday that the bank plans to cease all of its operations and then liquidate the company. Due to the fact that it is one of the largest banks capable of conducting cryptocurrency transactions, it was inevitable that it would see some impact occasionally.
