China crackdown sends Bitcoin tumbling below $30,000
The price of Bitcoin tumbled below $30,000 for the first time since January, wiping out all its gains for the year.
The world’s biggest cryptocurrency plummeted by as much as 12 per cent to $28,893 on Tuesday, after China’s central bank intensified a crackdown on cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin has fallen 50 per cent from its April peak of around $65,000, in the latest slump in a wider downturn that has demolished the market cap of all cryptocurrencies in the last few days.
Today’s drop had a domino effect on smaller coins, with Ethereum, Cardano and dogecoin all taking a hit.
Charting the cryptocurrency’s value year-on-year however, Bitcoin does remain up: it was trading below $10,000 this time last year.
The market-wide sell-off was triggered by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) asking China’s largest state-owned banks and payment firms to crack down harder on cryptocurrency trading on Monday.
China was one of the world’s most important cryptocurrency markets, so efforts by Beijing to regulate the currency has huge ramifications.
The Chinese government has banned the mining of bitcoins in many of the country’s major provinces over the last week, which has resulted in more than half a trillion dollars being wiped from the global cryptocurrency market.
“It basically says now OTC transactions are not legitimate … we are not allowed by the banks to transfer money for cryptocurrency purchases and sales,” Bobby Lee, chief of cryptocurrency wallet app Ballet told Reuters.
wiping out almost all of its gains for the year, with a sweeping regulatory crackdown putting the world’s leading digital asset under persistent pressure.