Cryptocurrencies fell Thursday, with Bitcoin (BTC) falling below $25,000 and XRP and Cardanos ada (ADA) extending 24-hour declines as high as 7.4%. The total market cap is down 3.8% over the past 24 hours, data from CoinGecko shows.
More declines could be imminent, with some traders suggesting Bitcoin could fall as low as $23,500 based on a price chart analysis.
“Bitcoin has fallen back to local resistance levels from August last year to February this year,” Alex Kuptsikevich, a senior market analyst at trading firm FxPro, told CoinDesk in an email. “The bulls may be attempting to sustain the sell-off near this level, but the current decline is still within the downtrend that has been in place since April.”
A descending channel refers to a downtrend in any asset, characterized by prices making lower highs in the short-term.
“Stronger support for bitcoin is near the 200-day moving average – now at $23.6k and points to higher value,” added Kuptsikevich.
ADA’s drop means it has fallen more than 20% over the past week after it was named along with 12 other tokens in a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase called security.
XRP erased all gains from a surge earlier this week as markets digested the “Hinman emails” from a Ripple Labs filing on Tuesday. The emails of William Hinman, a former director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, were made public in connection with the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple.
Ether (ETH), meanwhile, is down 6.4% over the 24-hour period, while ether tracking futures saw the highest liquidations among majors at $57 million out of a total of $143 million for all crypto tracking futures recorded.
Liquidation is when an exchange forcibly closes a trader’s leveraged position due to a partial or total loss of the trader’s original margin. This happens when a trader is unable to meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position, meaning they do not have sufficient funds to keep the trade open. Large liquidations can signal the local top or bottom of a steep price move, potentially allowing traders to position themselves accordingly.
USDT balances on Curve’s popular 3pool, a stablecoin swap pool comprised of USDT, USDC and DAI, surged over 72% early Thursday, suggesting traders are trading tens of millions of USDT against USD Coin (USDC) and Dai ( DAI) had exchanged ).