Bitcoin rollercoaster continues as price dives below $10,000

Just a week ago, as the price of one bitcoin surpassed $10,000 for the first time in more than a year, it appeared that the rise of the most popular cryptocurrency is unstoppable. 

Each day, Bitcoin hit new highs, almost touching $14,000 on June 27 — and then the growth abruptly stopped and the price started going the other direction. Five days later, and one bitcoin dropped to $9,835, having fallen more than 10 percent in the last 24 hours according to CoinMarketCap. (During the couple of hours needed to write this text, the price recovered to $10,225.)

The prices of other popular cryptocurrencies followed suit. Ethereum is down to $282, a 4.5 percent decline in 24 hours, and XRP is down to $0.395, a 3.4 percent decline in that same period. 

So what has changed in the last week? Frankly, not that much. 

The consensus amongst prominent cryptocurrency investors and traders appears to be that Bitcoin has simply risen too high, too fast. Investor Mike Novogratz, for example, called the recent pump a “frenzy,” and said he’d sold some of his Bitcoin last Wednesday, and that he wished he’d sold more. Days before the crash, trader Alex Krüger said prices will pull back “eventually.” Crypto researcher Jameson Lopp warned about the dangers of Bitcoin going “parabolic.”

Even with the price dropping, however, most pundits remain optimistic. Novogratz later said that he thinks prices will consolidate between $10,000 and $14,000 before “next move higher,” adding that he’s still “very bullish.”

Krüger, too, thinks the price will “eventually break higher,” adding that there is still positive news ahead for the cryptospace, and echoing the oft-heard sentiment that this cryptocurrency bull run will match or surpass the last one. 

In terms of actual news, nothing hugely negative has happened since Facebook dropped its Libra bomb. Even though the launch of Facebook’s crypto platform and stablecoin is likely a year away (or more), banks and institutions are taking notice. 

Other than that, the news has been positive. On the Bitcoin front, cryptocurrency exchange Binance has just announced that it’s soon launching futures trading, with testing commencing in a few weeks. The Ethereum Foundation has announced “spec freeze” for the major new version of Ethereum called ETH 2.0. This means the code for ETH 2.0 has been finalized, and even though there’s still a lot of testing and bug fixing to be done, this makes it more likely that ETH 2.0 will launch on schedule, i.e. in January 2020. 

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.