Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, has recently seen its price drop to less than $3,900 as the cryptocurrency bears have seemingly taken over what was so far being the largest bullish rally the crypto ecosystem had seen in a while.
According to CryptoCompare data, BTC is now trading at $3,860 after a massive red candle saw its price drop to a low close to $3,800, before it seemingly started to recover. Despite the massive sell-off, BTC is still up by 6.2% in the last two weeks.
The cryptocurrency hit its all-time high near $20,000 in December of 2017, and hit a low of $3,200 in December of last year. Its price has since then been recovering, and managed to surpass the $4,000 mark this weekend.
The bullish rally is believed to be related to increasing adoption and the ongoing development of its layer-two scaling solution, the lightning network (LN). As CryptoGlobe recently covered Bitcoin’s LN ‘torch’ recently reached Fidelity Digital Assets, which is set to launch its crypto custody service next month.
Currently, there are various fun, interesting use cases for the layer-two scaling solution. While what is currently behind the recent sell-off is unclear, analysts are pointing to technical indicators to justify it.
10/ Prices may crash again. After all, bitcoin's demand is almost entirely speculative, and natural sellers (miners, exchanges) will always sell.
However, it is clear there is strong buying interest below. Long term speculators check: https://t.co/ph5GH7sNP6
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) February 20, 2019
Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at eToro, noted that “what comes up must come down,” and that the sell-off is a reminder that the cryptocurrency space is an extremely volatile and risky one.
What goes up must come down and that which pumps must eventually dump.
That last sell off is a sobering reminder that crypto is extremely volatile and high risk.
Let's see if we can hold here $3,800 would be a nice place to build support.
— Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) February 24, 2019
The sell-off, which has seen over $10 billion leave the crypto ecosystem, has seen most altcoins turn red as well. At press time, ether, EOS, LTC, XRP, and BCG are all down between 2.5% and 6%, while TRX, ETC, and ZEC are down between less than 1% and 1.7%.
NEO, however, is seemingly bucking the bearish trend along with Ontology, as these tokens are 6.6% and 7.4% respectively. Ontology, as covered, is seeing its development platform get released on Google’s cloud marketplace.