Blockchain
Bitcoin trades below $65,000 after Wednesday’s decline
Bitcoin (BTC) struggled to stay above $65,000, after falling below $64,000 during U.S. trading hours on Wednesday. After briefly reclaiming $65,000, BTC has slipped toward the $64,500 mark, down about 1% from its 24-hour high. The CoinDesk 20 index is down about 2.4%. Wednesday’s rally halt followed a stock market sell-off, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq index down 2.7% and the S&P 500 down 1.3%. Joel Kruger, a market strategist at LMAX Group, said the crypto rally could stall if the stock market sell-off turns into a correction, but over a longer time frame it could provide a haven for investors fleeing stocks.
The possibilities of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from November election reaches 68% on the cryptocurrency-based market prediction platform Polymarket. Biden announced on Wednesday that he had been diagnosed with Covid-19, after previously saying he would reevaluate whether to run “if [he] had some health issues.” The president has so far given a poor performance during the campaign, particularly during a debate with Donald Trump, who is considered the significantly more pro-crypto candidate. Trump’s perceived chances of winning have become a yardstick for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin’s rally to over $65,000 this week followed the assassination attempt on Trump, which was seen as a confidence boost in his prospects of retaking the White House.
Various cryptocurrencies suffered significant losses after a malicious attack on Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX. The WRX platform’s native token fell 15% to just over 14 cents, while the meme coin shiba inu (SHIB) tumbled nearly 10%. The WazirX attacker walked away with more than $230 million in customer funds, including $100 million in SHIB and $52 million in ETH. Other tokens were relatively stable in dollar terms, although they suffered significant losses in Indian rupee-denominated pairs. The bitcoin-income pair fell 11% to 5.1 million rupees ($60,945), a huge discount to rival exchange CoinDCX. Meanwhile, the USDT-INR pair on WazirX fell 8%.