Crypto Today: Bitcoin plummets below $12K, Ethereum approaches $1K

Heavy sell-off in crypto space weigh on coins.
Long overdue correction gets underway.
Total market cap decreases more than $150 billion.

Eren Sengezer FXStreet

Every single cryptocurrency in the top-20 in terms of market capitalization dropped nearly 20% or more on Tuesday as concerns over South Korea banning the trading activity in exchanges triggered the long overdue correction. The BTC/USD pair dropped below the $12K mark for the first time since early December and was last seen trading at $11,586.70 with a daily loss of 18.07% while the ETH/USD pair was down 19% at $1,073.32 and the XRP/USD pair was losing nearly 30% at $1.27.

Korean news agency Yonhap earlier today reported that the South Korean was formulating a plan to clamp down on the "irrational" investment in cryptocurrencies citing a recent radio interview of Finance Minister Kim Dong- yeon.

"The government stance is that it needs to regulate cryptocurrency investment as it is a largely speculative investment. The shutdown of virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options (that the government has)," Kim said according to Yonhap.

Commenting on today's trading action, “anybody that understands the technology knows there’s going to be a correction - it’s going to be a big correction and it’s going to be indiscriminate, because there are no established fundamentals for anybody to distinguish between where there is and isn’t value. There’s no way you can rationalise that there’s any value in the market at the moment; everything is significantly overpriced,” Jamie Burke, chief executive of Outlier Ventures told Reuters.

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies decreased to its lowest level of 2018 at $534 billion with Bitcoin remaining as the largest cryptocurrency with a market dominance of 35%.

Author

Eren Sengezer

FXStreet

As an economist at heart, Eren Sengezer specializes in the assessment of the short-term and long-term impacts of macroeconomic data, central bank policies and political developments on financial assets.

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