Bitcoin breaches the US$22,000 floor as the market is hit by the collapse of Silvergate cryptocurrency bank

Thursday early trading in Asia saw Bitcoin fall below the US$22,000 support level, with Ether and the majority of other top cryptocurrencies also declining after U.S. crypto bank Silvergate announced it will voluntarily liquidate. The bank has been perilously close to going bankrupt for weeks, becoming yet another casualty of the failure of the FTX exchange in November. The top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization’s losers included Solana, and the industry’s overall capitalization was less than US$1 trillion. BTC gained. The possibility of interest rates increasing more than anticipated this year caused U.S. stocks to end the day with a mixed performance on Wednesday.

Quick Facts

According to statistics from CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin lost 2.34% over the previous 24 hours to reach US$21,729 in Hong Kong, bringing its loss over the previous seven days to 8.06%. The largest token by market capitalization is still up more than 30% for the year, though, thanks to a solid start to 2023 after a slump in 2018 due to scandals and bankruptcies in the crypto industry.

The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ether, decreased 1.91% to US$1,535 and experienced a 7.55% weekly loss. Although it has gained 28% so far this year, much like Bitcoin.

Solana was the worst performer, losing 8.86% to US$18.49 and 17.49% over the previous seven days.

XRP increased by 2.69% to US$0.39 despite Silvergate Bank’s difficulties in the broader market, continuing its upward trajectory. On Wednesday, Stuart Alderoty, the chief legal officer of the XRP-powered cryptocurrency payment network Ripple Labs, tweeted that the judge had agreed with some of Ripple’s arguments in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against the company. Alderoty wrote in the tweet, “We have always felt confident about our cause and with each ruling, even more so. Over the course of seven days, the coin increased by 2.50%.

Shiba Inu lost 0.55% over the previous day, but it was still able to surpass Litecoin as the tenth-largest non-stablecoin by market capitalization. Following the news that Shibarium, a Shiba Inu layer-2 blockchain for Web3 and gaming, will debut its beta version this week, the price of the meme token temporarily increased on Wednesday.

Due to mounting financial losses and ongoing regulatory investigations, California-based lender Silvergate Capital Corp. declared on Wednesday that it would liquidate Silvergate Bank and cease all activities. Silvergate Bank provided financing to the cryptocurrency industry.

The overall value of the cryptocurrency market decreased by 2.26% in the previous day to US$995.70 billion. Over the past 24 hours, total trading activity decreased 0.43% to US$44.50 billion.

Tuesday saw uneven trading in American stocks. The S&P 500 edged up 0.14%, the Nasdaq Composite Index increased 0.40%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 0.18% lower.

On Wednesday, Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, testified before Congress that the central bank would first evaluate the most recent economic statistics on inflation before deciding the size of the interest rate increase anticipated at the bank’s meeting later this month. When Powell suggested on Tuesday that higher interest rate increases might be necessary to lower inflation, U.S. stocks fell the same day.

According to a report by Automatic Data Processing, private employers added 242,000 jobs in February 2023, exceeding the Reuters estimate of 205,000. This indicates that inflation is still entrenched in the United States.

Since March 2022, the Fed has increased interest rates eight times; the present rate, which ranges between 4.5% and 4.75%, is the highest since October 2007. There is a 21.4% possibility, according to CME Group analysts, that the Fed will increase interest rates by another 25 basis points this month. Additionally, they foresee a 78.6% probability of a 50 basis point increase, up from a 69.8% chance on Wednesday.