Bitcoin and Ethereum See Red as Crypto Market Boom Turns to Gloom

Markets are seeing red early Tuesday morning as Bitcoin drops 7% and Ethereum lags 10%.

The global crypto market cap has contracted by 8% since yesterday, having dropped below $2.5 trillion after last week getting within 5% of matching its all-time high market capitalization crypto markets last saw in early November 2021.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is $63,142.39 after having briefly dropped below the $63,000 mark, according to CoinGecko data. It's been a rapid change of scenery for Bitcoin traders. BTC set a new all-time high by inching above $73,000 last week.

Ethereum has fared even worse than Bitcoin.

Early Tuesday morning, the Ethereum price was $3,230.05. That's a 10% drop since yesterday and 20% lower than it was this time last week, when the Ethereum community was ramping up for the Dencun upgrade to go live on mainnet.

The stark Bitcoin and Ethereum price drops mean that a lot of long positions opened by optimistic traders have been liquidated, according to CoinGlass. In the past day, more than $500 million worth of long and $100 million worth of short positions have been liquidated across digital asset contracts.

When a trader opens a long position, it's essentially bet that an asset will increase in price by a certain date. Ideally for investors, they only sell the asset once they've realized some gains and want to take profit. But in extreme cases, an exchange or brokerage can force a trader to liquidate because the asset has seen a big drop in price.

Meanwhile, many of the meme coins that were stealing the show a few weeks back have seen even larger losses. That's usually the case for meme coins. When the market's largest assets, like Bitcoin and Ethereum see price movement, memes can especially volatile and see outsized gains and losses.

Solana meme coins Dogwifhat (WIF) and Bonk (BONK) have dropped 22% and 19% respectively in the past day. And Floki Inu (FLOKI), one of their Ethereum-based Shiba Inu-themed meme coin competitors, has shed 20% since yesterday.

Even Jupiter, the Solana DEX that yesterday pledged to help out the Slerf presale buyers who just lost $10 million, has seen its JUP token drop 16% since this time on Monday.