Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Cryptocurrencies suffered massive losses that has placed its record highs of 2017 further in the rearview mirror.
In a year of unrelenting terrible news for digital coins, Thursday’s results were a doozy: Bitcoin had dropped almost 5 percent in morning trading to $6,303, while XRP and ethereum both plunged more than 10 percent, as CNBC reports, citing data from Coinmarketcap.com. When the dust had cleared, it took just three hours for roughly $13 billion in value to be wiped out of the cryptocurrency market, according to CNBC.
Thursday’s results are proof that things seem to be going from bad to worse for the crypto market. When cryptocurrencies “plumbed new depths” in September, as Bloomberg referred to it, it meant the MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index had fallen 80 percent since January.
This represented a bigger plunge than the “Nasdaq Composite Index’s 78 percent peak-to-trough decline after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000,” Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg has also compared Bitcoin’s plunge this year to to Pets.com, which – fair or not – is often held up as the symbol of one of the the Dot-com bubble’s biggest problems: There was a lot of money spent on generating marketing hype by the startups, but very often no fundamentals to back up that hype.
As of Thursday, Dead Coins – which tracks “deceased” cryptocurrencies – listed 929 tokens that are now worth nothing.
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