Crypto Market Blip – Why Is It Down Today?

The crypto market took another tumble today as prices fell just hours after reaching all time highs.

Bitcoin, along with many other top tier cryptos, experienced a price shock Wednesday afternoon when prices plummeted just hours after achieving all time highs.

Bitcoin hit a price high of $68,744 (Coinmarketcap.com) before falling sharply to $64,050 in less than four hours. The price shock was felt across the board with other major crypto experiencing similar pain. Ethereum fell from $4,858 to $4,538 whilst current market darling Solana dropped from $247.80 to $222.33.

Many commentators were quick to blame Chinese property developer Evergrande Group and its frantic attempts to avoiding defaulting on their bond payments but on closer inspection this does not appear to be the culprit. While the domino effect that a massive debt default may cause the worldwide financial markets is certainly cause for concern, for those who are well versed to the unregulated crypto wild west Wednesday’s average 8% pull back was nothing new.

Crypto Market Recovery Position

The real question investors are asking themselves is how well have prices recovered?

Some coins have been hit harder than others. In classic investor / trader fashion Polkadot’s much anticipated Parachain Auction launch was hit with a massive 23% fall as investors ‘sold the news’ on the day of launch. Less than 48 hours after hitting an all time high of $53.81 DOT slid to just above $41.50 on some exchanges. Prices have recovered since with DOT’s current price at around $45.

Even more worrying was OmiseGo’s (OMG) 35% fall from an all time high of $19.60 to a low of  $12.62 in little more than 15 hours. This spectacular fall from grace occurred immediately after a ‘wallet snapshot’ was conducted in order to grant OMG holders with free supplies of BOBA token. Although this kind of activity has been witnessed many times before (the XRP - Flare token air drop comes to mind) the speed and level of co-ordination in the OMG / BOBA situation is something to behold.

The Call for Regulation

So where are we now? As I mentioned above, the overall cryptocurrency market cap only fell by 8% which in crypto terms is just a blip on the horizon. However, at time of press many tokens are continuing to fall in price and the overall market cap stands at $2.77 trillion, a drop of over $100 billion in the previous 24 hours.

While this is nothing to be afraid of, it does demonstrate how open to manipulation the cryptocurrency market is without laws to protect investors. Although the market has matured significantly in the last 12 months, if crypto truly desires promotion to the premier league of investment class it really needs to address this blatant market manipulation and the only way crypto can achieve this is through policy and regulation. Watch this space.