Bitcoin Price Falls Further as Crypto Liquidations Top $330 Million

By Ryan S. Gladwin

Bitcoin has fallen below $60,000 for the first time since early May. This comes after an announcement that Mt. Gox creditors will start receiving repayments in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash next week. 

The world’s leading cryptocurrency had been cooling off all month after an exciting start to the year, following the SEC’s approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. But it’s taken its hardest hit today falling 6.2% over the past 24 hours to a daily low of $59,962, per data from CoinGecko. Crypto exchange Coinbase shows an even larger dip, falling as low as $59,780.

Now-defunct Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox was hacked in 2014 leading to the loss of $63.6 million of Bitcoin at the time—worth some $46 billion at Bitcoin’s current price. A decade later, Rehabilitation Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi said in a note that creditors will start receiving payments in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash commencing in early July.

This apparently scared the market, as fears spread that Mt. Gox creditors would instantly sell off their reclaimed coins. According to Spot on Chain, the three wallets controlled by the defunct firm total 141,686 BTC worth approximately $8.71 billion. If this were happen, it would see a comparable amount of capital leave the market as what the U.S. Bitcoin ETFs saw flow in following the January approval.

Over the past two weeks, over $1.2 billion worth of assets has flowed out of U.S. Bitcoin ETFs, according to CoinShares reports. “We believe this is in reaction to the pessimism amongst investors for interest rate cuts by the FED this year,” CoinShares Head of Research James Butterfill wrote in a Medium post.

Mor than $335 million worth of crypto positions have been liquidated over the past 24 hours, per data from CoinGlass, including $293 million worth of long positions—or bets that the price of a specific asset will increase.

Bitcoin makes up the largest share of the bleeding, with $145 million in liquidated positions. Over $134 million worth were from long positions.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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