red markets

Altcoins bleed as crypto markets fall to new 2018 low

The entire crypto market seems to be behaving like one big pump and dump at the moment. A brief rally sent Bitcoin climbing over 25% in July only to dump it all again on an anticipated announcement by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Crypto pundits and industry experts had already warned that the likelihood of the SEC approving a Bitcoin ETF this year was very low. Yet panic has swept over the crypto sphere once again as sellers couldn’t get rid of their digital coins quick enough.

The resultant FUDfest has caused markets to fall to their lowest levels in 2018, which was $229 billion a couple of hours ago according to coinmarketcap.com. This beats the previous low of $233 billion on June 29 and the one prior to that of $244 billion on April first. The new lower lows indicate that we are still not out of the bear market and the down trend may well continue.

While Bitcoin has lost almost 70% since its high of $20,000 late last year it is the altcoins that have suffered more. BTC is still higher than its price levels this time last year but many of the altcoins are almost back to those prices wiping out an entire year’s gains.

XRP has taken a huge hit today dropping 14% to $0.35. Since its ATH of $3.70 in January, Ripple’s digital token has crashed a whopping 90% to current levels. EOS has not fared much better with a drop of nearly 15% on the day to $6.05. Since its ATH of $21.46 in April EOS has plummeted 72% in just three months to its current levels. Litecoin has fared even worse with a collapse of over 82% from the ATH of $372 in mid-December. LTC is down 11.5% on the day to $66.18.

Iota is having a really bad week, falling 33% in just four days from $0.98 on Saturday to $0.66 today. This IoT based altcoin is back to early November prices and still falling. No crypto is escaping the bears today as a sea of red envelops the markets. Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, Tron, Monero, Neo, Nem, Tezos and OmiseGO are all down double figures. Neo has crashed back to September 2017 levels, and XEM is back to its July 2017 price range of $0.12.

As altcoins wipe out an entire year of gains recovery will be a long and slow process, and one which may not occur during the rest of 2018.