bear market.)
The price fell below $40,000 for the first time in 14 weeks and dropped below $37,000 at one point early Wednesday.
The move comes after China on Tuesday barred financial institutions from conducting crypto-related transactions. Separately, a JPMorgan report showed large institutional investors were dumping bitcoin in favor of gold.
The pullback this month in bitcoin intensified a week ago after Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to change his tune a bit on crypto by saying the company would stop accepting bitcoin for payment because of environmental concerns surrounding crypto-mining.
“You had a confluence of events…where you started breaking down the positivity in the price action, and now we’ve got a liquidation event,” Galaxy Digital CEO and Chairman Mike Novogratz told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It’s not going to bounce right back. It’ll consolidate for a while.”
CRYPTO-RELATED STOCKS DROP AMID BITCOIN’S SLIDE
TICKER COMPANY %CHANGE PRICE
TSLA Tesla Inc 0.00 577.87
COIN Coinbase Global Inc 0.00 239.00
MSTR Microstrategy Inc 0.00 487.20
SQ Square Inc 0.00 203.16
NVDA NVIDIA Corp 0.00 560.63
PYPL PayPal Holdings Inc 0.00 243.21
Tesla, still a large holder of bitcoin, fell roughly 5% in premarket trading Wednesday. Microstrategy, which made headlines by buying a significant amount of bitcoin for its corporate treasury, tanked by 15%.
Coinbase, the newly public crypto exchange, dropped more than 10%. Bitcoin’s price approached $65,000 five weeks ago before peaking, around the time of Coinbase’s public debut.
Square and PayPal — which facilitate transactions in cryptocurrencies and have been big buyers — were also lower 6% and 4%, respectively, in premarket trading.
Nvidia ticked down 4% before the bell. The company manufactures chips used in crypto-mining, but reportedly trying to curb their use for that purpose.
