Bitcoin did not escape the bad day on Wall Street on Wednesday, and is trading a few minutes before the close at $21,200.
For a year, this currency has continued to accumulate bad sessions and has lost nearly 75% of its value, going from $83,000 to $21,000.
The most popular cryptocurrency in recent years has lost 14% in 24 hours, the equivalent of more than $3500.
Bitcoin is at its lowest level in two years.
According to some experts, this fall is explained because the FTX cryptocurrency platform lost more than 30% of its value overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday and affected bitcoin and ether.
The debacle of the FTX cryptocurrency platform, although led by one of the most prominent figures in the sector, represents a new alarm signal for a very young sector still regularly shaken by bankruptcies and already battered by the economic context.
FTX was worth $32 billion at the start of the year.
Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was compared to a white knight when he offered in June to come to the rescue of digital currency-linked companies BlockFi and Voyager Digital. When he wasn’t advocating for increased regulation in Washington.
But all it took was a few doubts about FTX accounts after the article from a specialized site and tweets from the boss of a rival of the platform, Changpeng Zhao, of Binance, to precipitate massive withdrawals.
Changpeng Zhao, saying FTX asked him for help due to a “significant liquidity crisis,” signed a letter of intent on Tuesday to buy the platform.
FTX’s disappointments “show that liquidity on cryptocurrency platforms is very variable”, remarks Dan Dolev, analyst for Mizuho, pointing out that there is in fact “very little capital” behind it.
The rapid disgrace of FTX “is a wake-up call” for the American platform Coinbase, for example, which mainly offers to exchange digital tokens and currencies, he says in a note.
Fans of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-related technologies are used to the succession of periods of great splendor and disappointment since the launch of bitcoin in 2009.
The value of the cryptocurrency market rose to $3 trillion in November 2021, before dropping below the symbolic $1 trillion mark in June.