The bullish momentum that saw Bitcoin reach a high of $25,000 in 2023 appears to have subsided.
According to Nairametrics, 58,468 investors liquidated their positions during the trading session, resulting in a loss of $158.84 million.
It is worth noting that the largest single liquidation order, valued at $7.52 million, was placed on Bitmex.
When long positions are liquidated without buying pressure from trading volume, the price of bitcoin suffers.
What caused the losses
The Federal Reserve’s ability to raise interest rates further, higher-than-expected US inflation data, and significant long liquidations all appear to be contributing factors to the pause in bullish momentum.
The price of Bitcoin has dropped following a market-wide decline, and experts are concerned that the United States Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions will continue to pose a serious threat to the cryptocurrency market.
In an early attempt to halt the trend, bitcoin bulls drove the price back up to more than $24,000. The asset appeared to have stabilized around that time, but the situation changed after the US revealed that the PCE inflation measure had increased by 0.6% in January.
Bitcoin’s price dropped sharply, dropping from $24K to just under $23K in response. As a result, the asset’s price dropped to its lowest point in ten days.
Performance of other cryptos
Ether’s lowest point this week would be when it fell below $1,600. The S&P 500 futures were down 1.4%, while the Nasdaq 100 futures were down 1.9%.
Polygon (MATIC), which had previously been one of the most volatile stocks, fell 16.7% this week and is now trading at $1.27. When word spread that Polygon Labs was laying off 100 employees (20% of its workforce) due to restructuring, MATIC’s downward spiral began on Tuesday.
Litecoin, Polkadot, and Cardano all experienced significant weekly losses, falling by close to 10%.
But it wasn’t all bad news in the crypto market. Stacks (STX) posted gains of more than 80% for the week as it got investors’ attention on reports that it plans to bring the complete functionality of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized applications (DApps), and smart contracts to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Furthermore, Solana, which fell for the majority of November and all of December due in part to its ties to officials from the defunct FTX exchange, has slowed its losses since the New Year, with the commodity falling just 1% this week. It was trading for $22.4 at the time of writing.
The primary factors in SOL’s success this week were news of the upcoming migration of the Helium network to Solana and a significantly higher volume of Solana NFT trading.
