Bitcoin Slides to $66K, Ether Dives 5% in Market-Wide Selloff

Cryptocurrencies bled lower on Wednesday alongside a slide in traditional markets across the board.

The CoinDesk 20 – an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, excluding stablecoins and exchange coins – was down 2.6% in the last 24 hours, with Chainlink (LINK) the worst performing, slumping 7.6%. The only project to buck the downtrend was Internet Computer (ICP), which rose 1%

Bitcoin (BTC) dipped 2.3% to $66,000, while ether (ETH) tumbled 5.3%, taking its price back under $2,490. Solana (SOL), meanwhile, showed further strength today – at press time, the coin was flat at $169.

ETH not only made new lows against BTC – the ETH/BTC ratio went below 0.038 for the first time since April 2021 – but also against SOL. The SOL/ETH trading pair notched a decisive new all-time high by rising 6.3% to 0.068 amid renewed debate in the crypto community about the wisdom behind Ethereum’s roadmap.

“Much of the poor sentiment and questions around Ethereum’s roadmap is due to recent underperformance versus BTC and SOL,” Brian Rudick, director of research at crypto trading firm GSR, posted on X.

“However, this is a poor comparison as BTC and SOL were subject to two large idiosyncratic events,” Rudick wrote, namely, the immense success of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, and the impact of the FTX collapse – and Solana’s resurgence from the ashes – on investor perception.

“Measuring from crypto’s ATH market cap in Nov 2021 to remove [the FTX collapse] shows ETH and SOL have had [about] the same performance,” Rudick added.

The looming U.S. election, only two weeks away, didn’t appear to offer any assistance either. Even with crypto-friendly Donald Trump in the lead (based on betting markets), and Vice President Kamala Harris appearing less adversarial towards crypto than the current administration, markets will have difficulty “breaking upwards before election day,” Joe Edwards, head of research at digital assets broker Enigma Securities, wrote in a research report.

The bleeding out Wednesday wasn’t contained to crypto. The S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow Jones were each lower by more than 1% shortly before the end of the session as price consolidated following strong runs higher for all over the past couple of months.

The bond market was also lower, with the 10-year Treasury yield rising to a three-month high of 4.25%. Making record highs on seemingly a daily basis of late, gold also pulled back, slipping 1.1% to $2,730 per ounce. The price of oil fell 1.35% to $70.77 per barrel.

“Don’t worry folks Tesla will save the market when they report earnings,” Ram Ahluwalia, CEO of crypto investment advisor Lumida Wealth, posted on X. “Overall, I’d say we are closer to the end of this move of pricing in higher for longer… November is looking very good in my view.”

Tesla is due to report its quarterly results after this afternoon’s market close.

Crypto equities felt the brunt of the pullback. Bitcoin miners fared the worst, with MARA Holdings (MARA) and CleanSpark (CLSK) each lower by about 5%. Coinbase (COIN) slumped 6% and MicroStrategy (MSTR) slipped 2.5%.