By Rae Wee and Elizabeth Howcroft
SINGAPORE/LONDON (Reuters) -Bitcoin fell below $90,000 for the first time in seven months on Tuesday in the latest sign that investor appetite for risk is drying up across financial markets.
The risk-sensitive cryptocurrency has lost all this year’s gains and is now down nearly 30% from a peak above $126,000 in October. It was down 1% at $90,907.51 in early European trading after touching as low as $89,286.75.
About $1.2 trillion has been wiped off the total market value of all cryptocurrencies in the past six weeks, according to market tracker CoinGecko.
Market participants said that a combination of doubts around future U.S. interest rate cuts and the risk-averse mood in broader markets, which have wobbled after a long rally, was dragging down crypto.
‘CONFIDENCE CAN ERODE WITH REMARKABLE SPEED’
“The cascading selloff is amplified by listed companies and institutions exiting their positions after piling in during the rally, compounding contagion risks across the market,” said Joshua Chu, co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association.
“When support thins and macro uncertainty rises, confidence can erode with remarkable speed.”
Speculators who had put money into crypto in the hopes of supportive U.S. regulation have started to pull back, causing steady outflows from ETFs and similar instruments in recent weeks, said Joseph Edwards at Enigma Securities.
“The sell pressure here isn’t extraordinary, but it’s coming at a relative weak point on the buy side … a lot of retail buyers were stung during the flash crash last month,” he said, referring to an October crash in which there were $19 billion of liquidations across leveraged positions.
Crypto stockpilers such as Strategy, miners such Riot Platforms and Mara Holdings, as well as exchange Coinbase have all slid with the souring mood.
European equities markets opened lower on Monday, with traders worried about an overvalued tech sector.
Cryptocurrency ether has also been under pressure for months and has lost nearly 40% of its value from an August peak above $4,955.
“All in all sentiment is pretty low in crypto and has been since the leverage wipeout of October,” said Matthew Dibb, chief investment officer at Astronaut Capital.
(Writing and additional reporting by Tom Westbrook, additional reporting by Elizabeth HowcroftEditing by Shri Navaratnam, Amanda Cooper and David Goodman)
