Bitcoin and the other big cryptocurrencies kept falling over the weekend, extending a week of heavy selling. Crypto trades around the clock, so prices moved while U.S. stock markets were closed.
Bitcoin traded at $68,839 at 4 p.m. Eastern on Friday, when the U.S. stock market closed. At 9 a.m. Eastern on Sunday it was at $65,399, down $3,440, or 5.0%. On Saturday evening, U.S. time, it briefly fell to about $62,000, its lowest level since mid-July, before recovering part of the drop.
Other large coins fell further. Over the same period, Ether dropped 6.0% to $1,829.84 after touching about $1,710, its lowest since early July. XRP fell 5.2% to about 97 cents, Solana fell 9.2% to $72.56 and Dogecoin slid 9.4% to about 5.9 cents.
No single piece of weekend news explained the drop. Crypto news outlets pointed to steady selling by U.S. exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin, to worries that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates after a hotter-than-expected October inflation report, and to forced selling by traders who had borrowed to bet on higher prices. U.S. spot bitcoin funds lost a net $185 million on Friday, their seventh straight day of outflows, and about $1.07 billion over the week, according to fund-flow trackers Farside Investors and SoSoValue as reported by The Block and Crypto Briefing.
Data firm CoinGlass, as reported by several crypto news outlets, counted about $2 billion of leveraged bets forcibly closed in the 24 hours to Sunday. In bitcoin, most of them were bets on rising prices.
In a separate event, the Kava Lend lending service said early Saturday that it had been hacked. About 55.2 million KAVA tokens, worth roughly $3.8 million before the attack, were drained, and the KAVA token fell close to 40%. Kava said the problem was contained within Kava Lend.
Prices in this story are as of 9 a.m. Eastern on Sunday, Nov. 15, and can change quickly.
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