Bitcoin, Ether Now Down 50% From Last Month’s ATHs as Rout Resumes

• In recent trading, the price of bitcoin was at $32,297.15, down 14.95%. Earlier in the afternoon it had reached as low as $31,179.69, all but wiping out year-to-date gains. At press time, ether was at $1868.79, down 17.8% after falling as low as $1,733.58. Even with today’s drop, ether is still up 159% year-to-date.
• According to Nick Mancini, analyst at crypto sentiment analytics platform Trade the Chain, the specific reason for today’s bloodbath was news from crypto exchange Huobi, which said it’s scaling back some of its offerings in some countries due to China’s increasingly hard line on crypto.
• “Right after the news broke, short term Bitcoin sentiment scores plummeted to levels not seen since May 19th, this was followed by a drop in price,” Mancini wrote.
• The moves by Huobi are the first concrete steps by a crypto company in response to China’s crackdown and it appears to be making the hard line much more real to investors.
• Even though Huobi was the specific catalyst for today’s plunge, it’s just the latest negative news in the sector that has been battered in the last few weeks. Fears of the crackdown on crypto in China, fears of coming regulation in the U.S. and Tesla turning its back on bitcoin have all pummelled the market.
• New investors to crypto, attracted by the massive gains in the space earlier in the year, are now unnerved by a price graph that isn’t constantly moving up and to the right, according to Joe DePasquale, CEO of BitBull Capital. Illustrating how the string of bad news has rattled new investors, the search query “Should I sell my bitcoin?” soared on Google over the past week, according to CryptoSlate.
• Thus the Huobi announcement reached an audience already expecting the worst and the effect of that negativity was intensified by the usual low volume found on a weekend, producing a selloff of memorable proportions.”

Read the full article at CoinDesk.com