Red Alert: Crypto Market Lost $136B in Past Month, LINK Drops to $0.0001 & XRP to 2020 Lowest

In a sudden and violent crash in the price of bitcoin wiped out all the profits that the world's leading cryptocurrency made in 2020 so far. From above 10,500, the 2020 peak Bitcoin reached on February 13, today, we fell as low as $5,720.

Today, Bitcoin price has been on a free fall on the back of heavy volumes however, for now, the digital asset has moved back above $6,000.

“Equities right now are a systematic risk to crypto. Forget the Rah Rah Pomp type talk before you lose money. Stay objective, stay vigilant. BTC is trading at the whim of what the ES allows it to do. It is like a dog chasing a bus and forgetting it is on a chain still,” said trader Cantering Clark.

Bitcoin joins Wall street sell-off on heavy volumes pic.twitter.com/u8hJWUBzUv

— skew (@skewdotcom) March 12, 2020

A drop of 24% in bitcoin price in the past few hours means altcoins dropped harder. This resulted in the overall market losing more than $50 billion.

Source: Coin360

Altcoins’ Rout

Coronavirus, which is now declared a pandemic by WHO has triggered a wave of historic measures that resulted in a steep drop in US stock futures and crypto market Thursday.

In the last 15 days, the S&P 500 has lost $5.6 trillion of market cap, 40x the current market cap of bitcoin, while the crypto market has lost $136 since Feb 15.

The second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum has dropped to $140 while XRP has gone to its lowest level of 2020 at $0.164.

$XRP just traded at its lowest price of 2020. If it were to continue dropping this fast, it would hit zero in a month.

— Alex (@classicmacro) March 12, 2020

Chainlink (LINK) is leading the losses with 37.52% that momentarily dropped to $0.0001 on Binance after the exchange’s system got overloaded 5x the previous peaks.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao reported on Twitter that the spot depth push experiencing delays, futures UI 500 errors, and some futures ADL and margin calls, which has been now all fixed.

Tezos (XTZ) follows LINK close behind with 34.18% losses. Among the low cap altcoins, Super Bitcoin (SBTC) is down 60.84% trading at $0.355 while Crowd Machine (22.11%) and Blit Predict (7.91%) are the only ones in the green beside a few stablecoins.

Getting more bearish on the economy

These losses came on the back of the US President Donald Trump announcing a 30-day European travel ban, however, “The European Union disapproves of the fact that the U.S. decision to impose a travel ban was taken unilaterally and without consultation,” said EU Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a joint statement.

The situation of the market is not expected to turn for good yet as economist and trader Alex Kruger says, “I've been getting more bearish on the economy by the minute, based on increasing odds of countries going into lockdown.”

In China, the epicenter of the virus, the situation is under control now which has been the result of extreme measures taken by the country that involved shutting down the affected regions and the economy.

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, outside of China, the governments would be required to implement similar extreme measures nationwide, as did Italy, which means, “small business and large corporations going bankrupt.”