BITCOIN’s biggest wallet lost $2.5billion on Saturday, December, 4, after the cryptocurrency plunged to a low of $45,033.
Bitcoin dropped from around $57,000 on Friday, December, 3, to $47,000, 24 hours later – losing $10,000 and more than 17 per cent.
This is a staggering drop of 34.5 per cent from an all-time high of $68,790 on November 10, 2021.
Wallet 34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo, which has the largest share of Bitcoin in the world – 288,000 of them – began seeing its fortune fade in the early hours of Saturday morning.
BitInfoCharts shows the wallet – which has been trading since October 2018 and owns 1.53 per cent of all Bitcoins – had $16.29 billion worth of the cryptocurrency on Friday.
By Saturday, that had dropped to $13.81billion, wiping out $2.48 billion in one day.
Overall, the wallet has shed $5.5billion in less than a month after reaching a high of $19.33 billion November 10.
Crypto began falling Friday and moved in tandem with a slump in the stock market after renewed economic uncertainty as the Omicron coronavirus variant continues to spread around the world.
Risky tech stocks were among the biggest losers on Wall Street on Friday, with Tesla dropping 6 per cent.
The sell-off has also been attributed to the mounting expectation that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates to stave off growing inflation.
News of Chinese property giant Evergrande’s chair being brought before the Guangdong government – after the company said there was “no guarantee” it would have enough funds to meet debt repayments – also contributed to the pull back.
The provincial government announced that it would send a team of officials to work on a restructuring plan for Evergrande’s offshore debt.
