Bitcoin down 70% from all-time high. Why is crypto market crashing?

The mayhem comes amid a broad selloffs of risk assets. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
-0.60%
fell almost 900 points, while the S&P 500 index
SPX,
-0.42%
entered a bear market. The Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
+0.27%
dropped 4.68%.

What’s more, investors are fretting over the news that crypto lending platform Celsius paused all withdrawals from customers and transfers between accounts, only one month after blockchain Terra’s collapse shook investors’ confidence on some crypto projects. 

Still, the majority of the crypto crash “has to do with macro, because crypto markets have been diving down since the latest CPI figure,” which was released on Friday, Gritt Trakulhoon, investment analyst at Titan, said in an interview. The U.S. cost of living jumped 1% in May, pushing the rate of inflation to a 40-year high of 8.6%, while showing no signs to slow down.

“I think it is all macro,” Bill Barhydt, chief executive at crypto financial service provider Abra, said in an interview. “We have extreme fear in the markets right now. The market has priced in several rate hikes plus they’ve started to price in a severe recession…we’re in complete risk off mode for all assets, just in the same way we were in risk-on mode,” Barhydt said. 

Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner at SkyBridge Capital, held a different opinion. “If the US market is going down 3% or 4%, could crypto go down 5% to 7%? Certainly. But I think this outsized drop is the result from the selling pressure that Celsius put on the markets,” Scaramucci said. Bitcoin lost 18% on Monday.