The price of bitcoin plummeted early Saturday, falling nearly $10,000 in roughly an hour to a temporary low of $42,000 before bouncing up to $45,000.
Bitcoin has fallen some $15,000 over the past 24 hours. Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, fell around $1,100 over the same time period.
The leading cryptocurrency reflected a broader drop in crypto markets, according to CoinDesk’s price index, with some cryptocurrencies falling more than 20% over the past 24 hours. Most of these assets appear to have suffered a sharp decline starting around 04:00 UTC Saturday.
According to CoinGecko, the overall market cap is currently hovering around $2 trillion.
Spot market selling seems to have driven the cryptocurrency lower before triggering huge stop loss in the derivative markets.
“So far I’ve seen upwards of 4000 BTC being sold that pushed the market abruptly down,” Laurent Kssis, a crypto exchange-traded fund expert and director of CEC Capital. “In fact, 1,500 BTC alone was sold in less than a minute at the time of the drop.”
Data tracked by Coinglass shows the price drop has triggered nearly $600 million worth of bitcoin futures positions in less than an hour. The market appeared over leveraged earlier this week with open interest (OI) elevated in bitcoin terms.