The fall was dizzying. On Wednesday, May 19, the price of bitcoin fell by nearly 30% during the day, flirting with the $ 30,000 mark – its January level – before rising to around $ 39,587 (32,523 euros) in the evening. The main cryptocurrency is now far (-40%) from the record reached on April 14, at 64,865.22 dollars.
In recent days, thousands of investors, individuals and especially institutions, have resold in panic the bitcoins they held on one of the dedicated platforms. Reason: Tuesday, May 18, the Chinese authorities banned the country’s financial institutions from offering their clients cryptocurrency-related services. Qualifying these as “Counterfeit currencies”, three major banking federations in the country also called on Wednesday not to accept them as a means of payment, warning against speculation.
If China has long been the eldorado of bitcoin, it is now at war with it. Notably because it is testing its own digital yuan, in order to regain control of private initiatives in the area of payment.
Violent dives and meteoric climbs
But this violent stall is also due to Elon Musk’s turnaround on the subject. After being the apostle of cryptocurrency for a long time and having helped to boost its price in recent months, the whimsical boss of Tesla announced on May 12, on Twitter, to suspend the possibility of paying for the cars produced by his group. with bitcoins, which was possible since March 24.
He denounced the ” crazy woman “ consumption of energy required to operate bitcoin, dropping its price from $ 56,600 to around $ 50,000 in a few hours. On May 16, Musk hit the nail on the head by hinting that Tesla had resold all of his bitcoin, causing it to dip a little deeper, before retracting.
On Wednesday, the other cryptocurrencies (ether, ripple, litecoin…) also fell off the hook. Including dogecoin, this cryptocurrency originally born as a joke in 2013, and regularly praised by Elon Musk on Twitter account. The total capitalization of cryptocurrencies fell to 1.390 billion dollars on May 19, against 2000 billion seven days before, according to CoinMarketCap.
This plummet is one more episode in the high volatility of cryptocurrency prices, which follow a series of violent dips and meteoric rises according to the various announcements from regulators, and liquidity injections by central banks on the markets or messages from the influential Elon Musk.
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