Bitcoin
Bitcoin (BTC) Drops to $60K as Mt. Gox Looms
Bitcoin (BTC) fell to $60,000 during the European morning on Wednesday, a 4% drop in the last 24 hours. BTC was hit the hardest amid a decline among major cryptocurrencies. The broader digital asset market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20), fell nearly 3.3%. The declines came after U.S. spot BTC ETFs snapped a five-day streak of inflows, posting $13 million in outflows on Tuesday. There are also concerns of further selling pressure from distributions from defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox. “The Mt. Gox launch is also scheduled to take place this week,” QCP Capital said. “This overhang of up to 140,000 BTC is likely to continue to weigh on markets, especially as the exact launch timeline is unknown at this time.”
US election-themed meme tokens are taking a hit, with several below nearly 95% of peak prices. Solana’s Jeo Boden (BODEN), a play on Joe Biden, has fallen 70% in the past week, CoinGecko data shows. BODEN is now down 80% in the past 30 days and back to levels last seen in early March when it was issued. Even Donald Trump-themed tokens have fallen, despite Trump’s election chances rising after the debate. The political finance (PoliFi) sector has fallen 11% in the past 24 hours, defying expectations for a rally after the June 27 debate. Austin Freimuth, a research analyst at Messari, said the significant event could be Trump’s selection of his running mate, if that triggers the creation of new meme coins.
The cryptocurrency industry is just getting started a major growth phase and is in a much better position than it was two years agoinvestment bank Architect Partners said in a quarterly report published last week. The cryptocurrency industry’s value surged more than $750 billion in the first half of the year, the firm said. The report described cryptocurrency as “the stepchild of the internet” and said it “exceeds the value of the internet at the same point in their respective life cycles.” Cryptocurrency and the internet, both disruptive technologies, have very similar characteristics, the report said, noting that the cryptocurrency market is recovering from the so-called crypto winter much faster than the internet recovered after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.