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The Crypto Market Just Fell to a New 2018 Low

Bitcoin sank to its lowest price in over a year on Wednesday – a move that seemed to drag down the prices of other major cryptocurrencies as well.

Bitcoin sank to its lowest price in over a year on Wednesday, with the prices of other major cryptocurrencies falling alongside it.

As of press time, bitcoin is trading at $5,525.92 – a more than 12 percent decline on the day – in the latest sign that volatility around the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has returned with a vengeance.

Indeed, bitcoin’s collective market cap dropped below the $100 billion level for the first time since November 12 of last year, according to CoinDesk’s Crypto-Economics Explorer (CEX).

Bitcoin Charts Suggest Price Bounce May Be Coming

In the past 12-hours alone, the total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market fell from roughly $210 billion to where it stands now, $180 billion. Today’s 15 percent depreciation has led the market to its lowest value since Oct. 31 of last year, CoinMarketCap data reveals.

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Other major cryptocurrencies are reporting declines in excess of 10 percent on the day, including ETH, XRP and bitcoin cash – the latter of which is gearing up for a contentious hard fork on Nov. 15.

Notably, market data indicates that in light of today’s market drop, XRP (as of the time of this writing) has the second-largest market capitalization for cryptocurrencies, surpassing ETH.

USDT, the stablecoin known more commonly as tether, saw a notable drop in its price to a low of $0.95 on crypto exchange Kraken, which offers one of the few trading pairs of the token against the U.S. dollar.

Bitcoin Price Sell-Off Slows As RSI Hits Four-Year Low

Tether, among other stablecoins, is intended to hold parity against the U.S. dollar, and data from CoinMarketCap shows that the token is trading in the $0.96-$0.97 range.

Because of the dip in USDT, the BTC premium on exchanges like Bitfinex, which trades against USDT, has risen to over $300. In other words, a single unit of bitcoin can now be purchased for $5,557 on Coinbase (a regulated exchange trading against USD) while the same unit costs $5,870 USDT on Bitfinex.

Disclosure: The author holds BTC, AST, REQ, OMG, FUEL, 1st and AMP at the time of writing.

Bear-gold-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-mouth-on image via Shutterstock; Graph via CoinMarketCap

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