tl;dr
The crypto market has experienced a significant downturn, with a $240 billion loss in market capitalization over the past day. Ethereum has been particularly affected, dropping by 16% to just below $1,800, its lowest point since October 2023. Analysts caution that if current support levels are not m...
The crypto market has experienced a significant downturn, with a $240 billion loss in market capitalization over the past day. Ethereum has been particularly affected, dropping by 16% to just below $1,800, its lowest point since October 2023. Analysts caution that if current support levels are not maintained, Ethereum could fall as low as $1,200. The ETH/BTC ratio is also at its lowest level since December 2020. The decline has been attributed to whales selling off ETH to avoid liquidation, as well as issues with Pectra testing and an unknown attacker causing empty blocks. The situation has led to heightened concern and negative sentiment on Crypto Twitter.
The crypto market capitalization has tanked to its lowest point since early November with $240 billion getting wiped out over the past day. This has resulted in a 6% fall to $2.6 trillion as all post-US election gains have now been wiped out. Ethereum has taken the brunt of the fall, losing a whopping 16% over 12 hours as it fell from around $2,140 to just below $1,800. Moreover, ETH is struggling to recover and was trading at $1,860 at the time of writing.
The last time Ethereum traded below $1,800 was in October 2023, when it was slowly emerging from the two-year-long bear market. There is solid support at current levels, which must be held to prevent the asset from tanking back to bear market lows following the formation of what appears to be a double-top chart pattern. Analysts have warned that if support here is lost, ETH could fall as low as $1,200. Ethereum is currently down a painful 62% from its all-time high in 2021, and the ETH/BTC ratio – which is a measure of the price of ETH in terms of Satoshis – is at its lowest level since December 2020, having fallen to 0.023 today, according to Tradingview. Only Dogecoin (DOGE) had heavier losses than Ethereum in the crypto top twenty today, with the memecoin melting by 11%.
Needless to say, the Ethereum derision and FUD had escalated to new heights on Crypto Twitter as traders and investors licked their wounds. The ETH angst has been exacerbated by problems with Pectra testing and an unknown attacker sending zero-token transfers, causing empty blocks. On March 9, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden said the issue had been fixed: "We suspected that the attacker was reading some of our chats, so we decided not to publicize the fix, but only update a few nodes that we controlled in order to get more full blocks on the network."