Bitcoin plunged to near $30,000, continuing a major sell-off that began a week ago.
The digital currency was down more than 30% on the day to $30,015.02, according to Coin Metrics. It hit as low as $30,001.51 as the selling intensified Wednesday morning. The cryptocurrency hasn’t traded below $30,000 since late January.
Wednesday’s decline extended bitcoin’s loss for the past week to more than 40%.
That means bitcoin has now erased all its gains following Tesla’s announcement that it would purchase $1.5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency. It’s also down more than 50% since hitting a record high of $64,829 in mid-April.
Other cryptocurrencies also plunged on Wednesday. Ether, the digital currency that powers the Ethereum blockchain, was down more than 30% at $2,235, according to Coin Metrics. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and has been talked up by Musk, fell more than 30% to about 32 cents.
Additionally, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was experiencing an outage for some users as the coins plunged.
Negative news over the past week has dampened sentiment for bitcoin.
On May 12, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric carmaker had suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin, citing environmental concerns over the so-called computational “mining” process. This is where high-powered computers are used to solve complex mathematical puzzles to enable transactions using bitcoin.
Musk’s comments caused over $300 billion to be wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market that day.