Elon Musk’s boost fades as bitcoin cracks 10% to $50,000 level
1 min read 25 Mar 2021, 06:39 PM ISTPrices of the world’s oldest cryptocurrency had regained the $57,000 level on Wednesday after Tesla chief Elon Musk announced that people can now start buying the company’s electric vehicles using the digital asset
PremiumA day after regaining the $57,000 level, prices of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, slumped below the $51,000 level on Thursday ahead of the options expiry on Friday.
As per a report in CoinDesk, the near-term focus in the bitcoin options market is on this Friday’s March expiry, where a record $6 billion of contracts are set to come due, with some analysts warning of an extreme pullback to what’s known as the “max pain" point, seen at $44,000.
Prices of the world’s oldest cryptocurrency had regained the $57,000 level on Wednesday after Tesla chief Elon Musk announced that people can now start buying the company’s electric vehicles using the digital asset.
“This week, we saw 5% strength in the dollar index, which has halted other markets, including bitcoin. This is also an indecisive zone, something which alt-markets don’t like. It would be interesting to see how markets behave as we near some major futures contract on 26 and 28 March," said Siddharth Menon, co-founder and COO, WazirX.
At 6pm IST, bitcoin was trading at $51,031.52, down 10.3% after hitting a high and a low of $57,239.10 and $50,962.52, respectively, over the past 24 hours, as per CoinGecko. With the latest fall, the cryptocurrency has come 15% off its all-time high of $61,711.87.
Meanwhile, ethereum was also trading around 10% lower at $1,561.44 amid a broader sell-off in alt-coins. It now stands 22.1 away from its lifetime high of $2,042.93.
Other major cryptocurrencies such as ripple, tether and cardano were trading up to 13% in the red.
However, experts are still bullish on cryptocurrencies. “The overall sentiment of the market is bullish, and the US Federal Reserve chairman said that bitcoin should be substituted for gold and not the US dollar. Plus, Elon Musk has made it possible to buy a Tesla with bitcoin and the collected tokes will not be sold for fiat currency. When a rally takes a pause, most of the impatient traders sell off, and it’s usually a good time to accumulate if you are in for the long term," said Menon.
