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Bitcoin Dives Under $90,000
Major crypto assets are deep in the red so far on Monday, with Bitcoin diving by 5.9% to around $85,786 according to crypto price aggregator CoinGecko. This extended the drawdown from the October all-time high of $126,080 to 31.7%.
Ethereum’s native token, ETH, the industry’s second-largest crypto by market value, also slid by 5.3% while Ripple’s XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin (DOGE) fell 6.8%, 7%, and 8.1%, respectively, as of this writing.
All the while, liquidations are piling up, with approximately $638 million worth of positions zapped over the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinGlass. The majority of the positions, $568 million worth, are long positions, or bets that an asset’s price will rise. Bitcoin and Ethereum are currently leading the wreckage, with about $188.8 million and $158.7 million worth of liquidations, respectively.
Will Bitcoin Fall Further?
For some industry pundits, crypto’s latest plunge is attributed to increasing expectations for the Bank of Japan to hike its interest rate at its next policy meeting in mid-December. The potential monetary tightening, which would be Japan’s first rate hike since January, has raised concerns about unwinding the massive yen-funded carry trades, triggering a wave of risk-on selling.
 
“$BTC dumped cause BOJ put Dec rate hike in play,” postulated BitMEX co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes in a Monday post on X, adding that a USD/JPY rate of between 155 and 160 “makes BOJ hawkish.”
Meanwhile, seasoned trader Peter has rekindled the idea of Bitcoin diving to sub-$40,000 levels. In a Dec. 1 post on X, Brandt captioned a chart indicating that Bitcoin’s macro downtrend could find support within the lower green zone, which lies between $45,000 and $70,000.
The crypto market will require dominant catalysts in the near term to force a sustained recovery.