Bitcoin continues its string of declines and has slipped below $26,500

The price of Bitcoin reaches its lowest price in the last 8 weeks at $26,290. The queen of cryptocurrencies is down about 4% over 24 hours.

It’s May 12, 2023, this morning the price of BTC hit an 8-week low, dropping below $26,200 around 8 a.m. before rebounding to around $26,300.

Over the past week, the price of BTC has fallen by about 10%, while over the course of a month it has dropped by about 13%. Ethereum is showing more resilience than Bitcoin this week.

As a reminder, since the end of April, the price of BTC has been mostly below the psychologically important $30,000 threshold. This is due to recent bankruptcies in the banking sector and other macroeconomic concerns that are worrying investors.

According to several analysts, the Bitcoin price is now heavily influenced by traders’ operations due to the low liquidity in the market.

It seems that there is currently paper-thin liquidity […] While we can’t point to a direct reason for the weakness, any medium to large supply drives the market down,” commented Matthew Dibb of Astronaut Capital.

“Volumes have dropped significantly and in the news this week two major market makers have exited a number of exchanges,” said Richard Galvin, co-founder of Digital Asset Capital Management, adding that this has impacted investor sentiment.

In addition to a lack of liquidity and a crackdown by U.S. regulators, analysts are also pointing to congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain related to the Ordinals protocol and BRC-20 tokens in an attempt to explain the digital coin’s latest move.

Bloomberg also reports that the correlation between Bitcoin and stocks has fallen sharply since its high point in late 2022.

In any case, the general consensus is that the persistent downward pressure can be attributed to various adverse events in the crypto industry as a whole, such as stricter regulations, legal issues, bankruptcies, and doubts about certain industry players.