Several altcoins in the top 10 are nursing 24-hour losses that are even bigger than Bitcoin's.
Bitcoin could be heading back to $30,000 after the crypto markets suffered sell-offs on Thursday.
At the time of writing, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency had lost 6.14% in 24 hours — taking BTC as low as $32,133.18.
Looking ahead, it seems that Bitcoin is now likely to retest lower levels after losing its momentum.
In other developments, some of the institutions that purchased crypto earlier in the year have been booking impairment charges — confirming that the value of their investments has fallen.
Meitu, a software company based in Hong Kong, announced it has lost $17.3 million because of Bitcoin’s terrible quarter. However, in a rather bittersweet development, it has secured paper profits of $14.7 million on Ether.
Only yesterday, reports suggested that Tesla could be heading for an impairment charge as high as $100 million after BTC effectively handed back all of the gains that it’s made so far this year.
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Visa Milestone, ETH Fees, Altcoin Update
Despite the short-term doom and gloom, there has been a little bit of bullish news around.
Visa has entered into a partnership to allow more than 50 companies to use its card program, enabling consumers to spend and convert crypto. It’s hoped this will make it easier for consumers to use digital assets at more than 70 million merchants around the world, even those that don’t accept it.
Cuy Sheffield, the company’s head of cryptocurrency, told Markets Insider:
“The merchants don't have to change anything," Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of cryptocurrency, told Insider. "It will be the same as any other Visa transaction to them. But on the backend, the crypto assets are instantly converted into fiat.”
Crypto enthusiasts who use DeFi protocols and invest in non-fungible tokens may also be breathing a sigh of relief after Ethereum fees fell to their lowest point since March 2020, the month when a brutal flash crash took place.
According to Coin Metrics, gas prices on the blockchain have been dwindling for several weeks and started trending downward in late April. This may be linked to the number of scalability solutions that have emerged in recent months.
Bitcoin appears to have weathered today’s bearish activity far better than the altcoins in the top 10 biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Ether has fallen by 9.51% over the past 24 hours, while XRP is down 7.39%, Dogecoin has lost 9.72%, and Polkadot is nursing losses of 10.21%.
