On Monday morning, Ethereum plunged more than 20%, a victim of a severely wounded cryptocurrency market that seems to have been pulled down by alarming indications of a possible impending global recession.
With the early wake-up call of a carnage on Monday, ETH fell almost 22%, from almost $3,000 to $2,280 at the time of writing.
However, Ethereum was by no means isolated from the harm inflicted by Monday’s still-developing developments. Cryptocurrency tokens have lost billions of dollars in value overall.
According to CoinGecko, the total value of the cryptocurrency market dropped below $2 trillion earlier this morning, to roughly $1.89 trillion at the time of writing. Since the start of the most recent cryptocurrency, this seems to be the first time that amount has dropped below $2 trillion.
The CEO of Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange, Gracy Chen, blamed macroeconomic issues such as signs of an impending recession in the US and Japan’s historic interest rate hike last week for a substantial portion of ETH’s current losses.
Chen stated that even though ETH is decentralized, its success is now inextricably linked to the state of larger markets.
“Ether is not an exception; all well-known and widely traded cryptocurrencies tend to mirror the broader market dynamics,” she stated to Decrypt. “Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is regarded as an indicator of the general state of the market.”
In contrast, Bitcoin dropped below $50,000 on Monday. This event, coupled with Ethereum’s collapse, contributed to the over $1 billion in liquidations of cryptocurrency-related holdings that have occurred over the last 24.
While many attributed ETH’s declining fortunes to the same causes that brought Asian stock markets plunging on Monday to their lowest levels in decades, other crypto-specific elements also appeared to be at play in the story.
The Singapore-based QCP Capital noted in a note on Monday that the crypto market has been severely impacted by wider economic developments. However, the note also linked the performance of ETH today to significant institutional sell-offs of the token, which started on Sunday.
Referring to the significant ETH-related moves made by the crypto trading firms on Sunday, the business noted, “The immediate trigger in crypto seems to have been aggressive ETH selling from Jump Trading and Paradigm VC.”
However, it seems that even those atypical transactions are connected to the larger international political and economic environment, which has alarmed traders lately.