Cryptocurrency prices today came under pressure after the US Federal Reserve delivered another big interest-rate hike and warned of economic pain from the aggressive policy tightening still to come. The Fed’s determination to raise rates to levels that hammer inflation at the cost of sliding asset prices sent a chill across global markets.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest and most popular cryptocurrency, was trading more than 2% lower at $18,627, came close to dropping below $18,000 level. The global crypto market cap today remained below the $1 trillion mark, as it was down over 2% in the last 24 hours at $943 billion, as per CoinGecko. On the other hand, Ether, the coin linked to the ethereum blockchain and the second largest cryptocurrency, continued to underperform and fell more than 6% at $1,260.
“Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most cryptocurrencies traded lower on late Wednesday after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 75 basis points marking the third consecutive time this year. BTC continues to struggle below the $19,000 since bears are more powerful than bulls in the market. The second largest crypto, Ethereum was seen changing hands above the $1,200 level. The price of ETH has been dipping since the Merge took place as miners continued to dump their ETH in the market coupled with macroeconomic factors. If the selling pressure from miners increases, ETH is likely to fall below the $1,000 level,” said Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder of Mudrex.
Meanwhile, dogecoin price today was also trading about 3% lower at $0.05 whereas Shiba Inu slipped more than a per cent to $0.000011. Other crypto prices’ today performance also declined as XRP, Stellar, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance USD, Polkadot, Litecoin, Apecoin, Cardano, Chainlink, Tron, Tether prices were trading with cuts over the last 24 hours, whereas Uniswap gained.
Such a backdrop offers little respite for crypto markets. They were already reeling from a $2 trillion plunge from a 2021 record high, an unraveling pockmarked with blowups such as the Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and the Terraform Labs project — whose co-founder Do Kwon is wanted by authorities.
(With inputs from agencies)
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