Markets are in the red early Tuesday morning with Bitcoin down 7% and Ethereum down 10%.
Global cryptocurrency market capitalization has fallen 8% since yesterday and has fallen below $2.5 trillion since last week, putting it within 5% of matching the all-time highest market capitalization cryptocurrency markets last saw in early November 2021.
As of this writing, the price of Bitcoin is at $63,142.39 after briefly falling below $63,000, according to CoinGecko data. This brought about a drastic change in the environment for Bitcoin traders. BTC hit an all-time high above $73,000 last week.
Ethereum did worse than Bitcoin.
Early Tuesday morning, the price of Ethereum was $3,230.05. This is down 10% since yesterday and 20% lower than this time last week when the Ethereum community was ramping up to release the Dencun upgrade to mainnet.
According to CoinGlass, the sharp decline in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices means that many long positions opened by bullish traders have been liquidated. Over the past day, more than $500 million in long positions and $100 million worth of short positions have been liquidated across digital asset contracts.
When a trader initiates a buy position, he or she is essentially betting that the price of an asset will rise by a certain date. Ideally, you only sell assets if you want to realize some profit and make a profit for your investors. However, in extreme cases, an exchange or brokerage may force a trader to liquidate because the price of the asset has fallen significantly.
Meanwhile, many of the meme coins that stole the show a few weeks ago have suffered much bigger losses. This is generally the case with meme coins. Memes can be especially volatile when the biggest assets on the market, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, see price fluctuations and can see huge gains and losses.
Solana meme coins Dogwifhat (WIF) and Bonk (BONK) are down 22% and 19%, respectively, over the past day. And one of the Ethereum-based Shiba Inu themed meme coin competitors, Floki Inu (FLOKI), is down 20% since yesterday.
Even Jupiter, the Solana DEX that pledged to support Slerf pre-sale buyers who lost $10 million yesterday, has seen its JUP token down 16% since this time on Monday.
