Bitcoin Slumped $1.5K as Tesla Sold Almost $1B in BTC (Market Watch)

After several days of heading north, bitcoin slipped by more than $1,000 after news broke that Tesla had sold the majority of its BTC holdings in Q2. The altcoins also retraced hard, with some massive declines from the likes of Cardano, Solana, Dogecoin, and others.

Bitcoin Slips Below $23K

The past week or so went quite well for the primary cryptocurrency, which had dipped below $19,000 on July 13 following the latest US CPI numbers. The bulls came to play at that point and didn’t allow any further declines.

Just the opposite, BTC started to gain value fast and reclaimed $20,000 before the weekend. Saturday and Sunday saw more impressive performances from the asset, which jumped beyond $22,000.

The landscape got even better after the start of the working week. This culminated in a price surge to over $24,000, which became the new highest price point in over a month.

However, news broke that Elon Musk’s Tesla had sold almost $1 billion of its BTC holdings during Q2. This had an immediate effect on bitcoin’s price, which dropped by approximately $1,500 and currently struggles below $23,000.

Its market capitalization has dropped to just under $450 billion, but the dominance over the altcoins has regained some traction and sits at 42.6%.

Alts in Red

Similar to bitcoin, most altcoins registered impressive gains in the past few days but have retraced on a daily scale.

Ethereum was among the most impressive performers. It skyrocketed from $1,000 to over $1,600 in about a week, charting a new 40-day high. Now, though, ETH has lost around 4% and trades just under $1,500.

BNB and XRP are down by similar percentages to $255 and $0.35, respectively. More losses, though, come from Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, MATIC, and Avalanche. All of them have declined by up to 8%.

The two largest memecoins – Shiba Inu and Dogecoin – have dropped by double-digit percentages.

With most lower- and mid-cap altcoins also sitting in the red, the cumulative market cap of all crypto assets has declined by $60 billion in a day. Nevertheless, the metric still stands well above $1 trillion.