Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP Sink as Crypto Liquidations Top $900 Million

Top cryptocurrencies pushed deeper into the red after a days-long slump Friday, triggering over $900 million dollars in liquidations, as global unrest and a poor U.S. jobs report impacted markets before the weekend. 

Bitcoin, which nearly eclipsed $120,000 towards the beginning of the week, has fallen to $113,411 at writing, a drop of roughly 5.6% from the recent peak. Ethereum took a steeper dive in the second half of the week, falling from around $4,000 on Sunday to $3,518 at writing—a 10.5% downturn. 

XRP followed a similar pattern, topping $3.32 on Sunday before dropping as low as $2.92 earlier today. The token has since leveled out to $2.98, a 10.2% dip since last weekend. 

Those slumps have coalesced to wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto derivative positions in just the last 24 hours. Some $905 million in positions have been liquidated since last evening, according to data from CoinGlass. The vast majority of those liquidations—over $823 million—were of long positions, or bets that the price would rise.

Several factors are likely at play in the latest crypto downturn, all of which relate to macro political and economic factors. On Friday morning, the U.S. Labor Department released a new jobs report that underwhelmed expectations to the degree that President Donald Trump fired the official responsible for publishing the memo within hours of its release.

Hours prior, the White House levied a new barrage of sweeping tariffs at nations around the globe, spooking markets on- and off-chain. And as if that wasn’t enough global drama for a Friday afternoon, Trump then announced he ordered multiple nuclear submarines to approach Russian waters, in response to threats made earlier in the week by a senior Russian official.

Analysts told Decrypt earlier this week that current Bitcoin price woes may also be thanks to a longer-term tug-of-war playing out between profit-taking whales and long-term holders. 

Many market participants are anticipating that Bitcoin’s price will continue to fall over the course of August and September, the analysts said—potentially as low as $80,000—before surging back in Q4.

Last week, Glassnode analysts predicted that should Bitcoin’s price fall below $110,000 after recent surges, the drop could trigger an acceleration in sell-offs.

Even amid the turmoil, Myriad users remain optimistic that the price of Bitcoin is more likely to rise to a new peak of $125,000 than drop back down to $105,000. Predictors give the climb to $125,000 a more than 53% chance, as of this writing. (Disclosure: Myriad is a product of DASTAN, Decrypt’s parent company.)