An attempt at Bitcoin the return to a record high was quickly snuffed out and reversed during Thursday’s morning U.S. action.
Trading just below $124,000 just before the stock market opened, bitcoin fell back below $121,000 about ninety minutes later. The action occurred alongside pullbacks in the previously red-hot gold and silver markets.
Gold has been in the headlines lately, but silver action may have been the driver today. Up 50% from April lows, the metal hit $50 an ounce for the first time on Thursday. This level, however, led to rapid profit-taking, with the price falling by around 4% in a matter of minutes. At press time, silver was changing hands at $48.55.
“In the near term, momentum appears unstable as technicals signal an increasingly overbought market; in the medium term, the appetite to maintain ranges above $50 is likely to persist if macroeconomic conditions and real yields remain favorable,” wrote Daniela Sabin Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.
For its part, gold fell by more than 1%, going from the level of $4,100 per ounce to the current level of $4,035.
The ongoing U.S. government shutdown could also begin to weigh on investor confidence, disrupting the release of key economic data and slowing operations at companies that rely on federal services, clouding traditional and digital asset markets.
Altcoins bleed against BTC
Smaller cryptocurrencies fared worse in the pullback: Ether fell 3.5% to $4,300, while BNB and DOGE also fell 3-4%.
Amid risk aversion, Bitcoin’s market share of the entire crypto market has reached its highest level in almost eight weeks. The Bitcoin Dominance metric rose above 59.4% for the first time since August, according to TradingView data, suggesting traders are redirecting their capital into the largest crypto asset.
The pullback also spilled over into crypto derivatives markets. More than $600 million in leveraged trading positions were liquidated across all digital assets in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data.
