A bitcoin attempt The rally to a record high was quickly snuffed out and reversed in US stock on Thursday morning.
Trading just below $124,000 just before the stock market opened, bitcoin settled back below $121,000 about ninety minutes later. The action came alongside pullbacks in previously red-hot gold and silver markets.
Gold has been grabbing most of the headlines lately, but the action in silver may have been the driving factor today. Up 50% from April lows, the metal hit $50 per ounce for the first time on Thursday. That level, however, spurred rapid profit-taking, with the price falling around 4% in a matter of minutes. At press time, silver was trading at $48.55.
“In the short term, momentum appears choppy as technical data points to an increasingly overbought market; in the medium term, the appetite to maintain ranges above $50 should persist if the macro and real performance outlook remains benign,” wrote Daniela Sabin Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.
For its part, gold retreated more than 1% from a challenge of the $4,100 per ounce level to the current $4,035.
The ongoing US government shutdown may also be beginning to impact investor confidence, disrupting the release of key economic data and slowing the operations of companies that rely on federal services, roiling traditional and digital asset markets.
Altcoins bleed against BTC
Smaller cryptocurrencies fared worse during the pullback: ether fell 3.5% to $4,300, while BNB and DOGE also fell 3% to 4%.
Amid risk aversion, bitcoin’s market share in the total crypto market rose to its strongest reading in nearly eight weeks. Bitcoin’s dominance metric rose above 59.4% for the first time since August, TradingView data shows, suggesting traders are rotating capital back to the largest crypto asset.
The pullback also spread to crypto derivatives markets. More than $600 million of leveraged trading positions across all digital assets were liquidated in the last 24 hours, CoinGlass data shows.
