Bitcoin falls below $20,000, ether, dogecoin, other crypto prices today also plunge; Litecoin surges

Cryptocurrency prices today plunged with Bitcoin extending its drop below $20,000 amid concern about the Federal Reserve’s rate-hike path. The world's largest and most popular cryptocurrency was trading more than a per cent lower at $19,848. The global crypto market cap today fell below the $1 trillion mark, as it was down over 2% in the last 24 hours at $994 billion, as per CoinGecko.

On the other hand, Ether, the coin linked to the ethereum blockchain and the second largest cryptocurrency, plunged more than 2% to $1,453. Ether had been outperforming the broader crypto market in recent weeks amid optimism over a pending network software upgraded called the Merge.

“Bitcoin fell below its threshold level after staying above US$20,000 for most of the weekend. Following a few weeks of a sustained upsurge, BTC faced rejection at the $25,000 level in the past week as it formed a bearish rising wedge. If BTC’s price closes below the $19,500 level today, we could see it going even lower. On the other hand, Ethereum dropped by nearly 11% last week after the recent hawkish comments by the Fed about increasing rates. Overall, the underlying sentiment suggests a downward trend in the coming week,” said Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder, global crypto investment platform Mudrex.

Meanwhile, dogecoin price today was trading over 2% lower at $0.06 whereas Shiba Inu was down a per cent at $0.000012. Other crypto prices' today performance also declined as Chainlink, Apecoin, XRP, Uniswap, Tron, Stellar, Binance USD, Polygon, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Tether prices were trading with cuts over the last 24 hours, whereas Litecoin surged nearly 4%.

Cryptocurrencies mirrored global markets and declined after Jerome Powell warned against prematurely loosening policy. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, signaled the US central bank is likely to keep raising interest rates and leave them elevated for a while to stamp out inflation, and he pushed back against any idea that the Fed would soon reverse course.

Cryptos have struggled through the first half of the year as the Federal Reserve hiked rates to combat stubbornly high inflation. Following the collapse of a major pair of tokens, some cryptocurrency lenders froze customer withdrawals, and several crypto firms have cut jobs.

(With inputs from agencies)