At the end of December and the beginning of January, the markets for cryptocurrencies reached their all-time high. Bitcoin was traded as high as $19,700 and the second largest cryptocurrency, ethereum, was at its peak traded at around $1,389.
Today, however, the situation is quite different. After having seen eight months of continuing declines, 99 of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies collapsed totally. The only cryptocurrency that actually gained value was the dollar backed “stablecoin” trueusd which shows a minor gain of +0.31 percent for the last 24 hours.
At the time of printing, bitcoin is traded at around $6,000 and ethereum at $264. For ethereum, this means a decline of more than 80 percent from the top, and the lowest levels since September 22nd last year.
It is still unclear what caused the crash, but on the social media side of the internet, people speculate in explanations reaching from pure technical analysis to theories surrounding market manipulation from institutional investors such as banks and investment firms.
However, the reason for the decline is probably a complex mix of many different factors, and could probably not be linked to a singular event causing the crash.
The Swedish crypto guru Eric Wall gave a pretty interesting analysis on Twitter, regarding ethereum. Wall points out that there is a built-in problem with ethereum compeditors using ethereum to raise money for their projects. This gives the projects the opportunity to both sell the ethereum-tokens they have collected in order to free the capital raised, but at the same time cause problems for their biggest competitor.
The problem when you give millions of $ETH to $ETH competitors is that they can unload the $ETH on the spot market and short $ETH on the futures market before that, so they're not only securing the funding but also manipulating the underlying spot market in favor of their shorts.
— Eric Wall | OP_😺 (@ercwl) August 13, 2018
The huge declines also made stellar (−9,93%) one of the five biggest cryptocurrencies, if only for a brief second during the night. Stellar currently has a market cap of $3,916,588,620 dollar which pushed eos (−14,39%) down to a sixth place. Right now, eos has a market cap of $3,939,884,300 and is once again the fifth largest cryptocurrency in the world.
The combined market cap of all cryptocurrencies is just over $190 billion right now, which could be compared to the combined market cap of $835 billion we saw during the 2017-surge.
Apart from bitcoin (−6,35%) and ethereum (−16,98%), xrp (−13,30%) and bitcoin cash (−14,86%) also lost heavily during the last 24 hours. The biggest losers on the top 100-list is however dropil (-29,81%) and zilliqa (-28,11%).
| Asset: | Price: | % (24h) |
| Bitcoin | $6 012,08 | −6,35% |
| Ethereum | $264,99 | −16,98% |
| Xrp | $0,263922 | −13,30% |
| Bitcoin cash | $492,40 | −14,86% |
| Eos | $4,35 | −14,39% |
