The crypto market falls back to earth… for now

Future. The crypto market (both currencies and art) is stumbling amidst pressures from governments, Technokings, and way too much hype. Now, some people are losing their shirts. But analysts tell people not to get too worked up, because the recent growth is unsustainable and unrealistic. The downturn may just be signs of a stabilizing market… or at least that’s what investors hope.

Rollercoaster money
The crypto market really fell back to earth this week.

• According to CoinMarketCap, the global crypto market fell 47% in seven days, down to $1.35 trillion from a high of $2.56 trillion just last month.
• Two of the most popular cryptos, Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively fell by 31% and 44%.
• Crypto exchange Coinbase, which just took a victory lap after a huge IPO, had a “partial” outage because of all the activity.

Contributing factors to the drop off have been China’s announcement that financial institutions in the country cannot accept digital tokens (probably because the country making its own) and Elon Musk walking back from accepting Bitcoin as payment for Telsas.

For his part, Musk tweeted that “Tesla has 💎 🙌,” apparently meaning that the company is holding on to its stock. But some crypto traders are so angry at Musk that they created a new crypto called STOPELON.

Shifty NFTs
But it’s not just cryptocurrencies that have taken a nosedive. Cryptomedia is also struggling to keep up with last month’s hype.

• NFT sales are down to about $28 million per week, down from last month’s $78.62 million.
• Even crypto-fan Mark Cuban still has an NFT up for sale on the OpenSea marketplace that hasn’t sold for over a month.

But Jeffrey Wang at the Amber Group (a crypto finance firm) thinks the market shifts are par the course, saying “crypto is an inherently volatile asset class, so swift and violent moves are going to happen over the course of time. This was a large flush out and if the market wants to continue higher it was likely necessary to remove some of the froth from over leveraged positions.” In other words: “chill, this was bound to happen.”