The price of Bitcoin is continuously falling. And no one knows where the low may be this time.
Bitcoin fell to a low of $80,760 on Friday and fell again before rising above $85,000. According to CoinMarketCap, the price at the time of writing is currently $82,800.
Zooming out, Bitcoin has had a brutal few months. It’s down 14% in the week, down 23.5% on the month, and down 34% since hitting an all-time high above $126,000 on October 6. As Bloomberg notes, Bitcoin is on track to have its worst month since the crypto collapse of 2022.
What happened in 2022? Then Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, FTX, collapsed. SBF was using customer deposits at its crypto exchange to cover funds lost at its other company, Alameda Research. But the real reason it all fell apart was that SBF was trading in the fake money it had created.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao purchased a 20% interest in FTX in 2019. When SBF and Zhao fell out in 2021, SBF bought his shares with a token that SBF called FTT – $2 billion worth of FTT. Zhao decided to cash out his FTT in 2022, knowing that it was not backed by anything, and it was the first domino to get caught up in a messy fraud case for SBF.
The SBF did a lot of other illegal things, but if Zhao hadn’t decided to essentially pull the rug out, it might have continued along just fine for years, knowing it would destroy his rival’s empire. The point is that when you build a business on fake money, it is incredibly vulnerable to even the slightest pressure. SBF is currently in prison, and Zhao is serving a five-month sentence in an unrelated case for violating anti-money laundering laws. Of course, Zhao was recently pardoned by President Donald Trump.
Which brings us to the price of crypto today and what it means for the industry at large. We’re already seeing crypto miners leaving for more profitable AI endeavors, and crypto analytics firm DappRadar announced on November 17 that it was shutting down for good. Are these the first signs of proper decline? No one knows for sure. But it certainly makes all the predictions of Bitcoin reaching $200,000 by the end of the year silly.
Bitcoin as well as other crypto tokens have suffered losses recently, though given President Trump’s major changes on crypto enforcement, the picture there is more complicated. Ethereum is down 31% on the month and 19% on the year. XRP (Ripple) is down 22% this month, although it is up 22% year to date as the price was suppressed due to litigation from the SEC. The Trump administration, which is extremely favorable toward crypto given the president’s huge stake, eased the pressure on Ripple in August.
BNB, Binance’s coin, has also fallen recently, but is still up after Trump’s SEC dropped the lawsuit against Binance in May. BNB is down 24% for the month but up 22% for the year. Solana has fallen by a whopping 35% in a month and 51% in a year.
Bloomberg reports that $2 billion was liquidated in leveraged crypto positions in the last 24 hours alone. Will this be the bottom? If you know the answer for sure in any direction, you can make a lot of money. The problem is that no one really knows.