Bitcoin plunged $ 1.5,000 as Tesla sold nearly $ 1 billion in BTC (Market Watch)

After several days of heading north, bitcoin slid more than $ 1,000 after news broke that Tesla had sold most of its BTC holdings in the second quarter. Altcoins have backed hard too, with some massive declines from the likes of Cardano, Solana, Dogecoin, and others.

Bitcoin slides below $ 23,000

The past week or so did well enough for the leading cryptocurrency, which fell below $ 19,000 on July 13 following the latest US CPI numbers. The bulls came to play at that point and did not allow for further declines.

Conversely, BTC began to gain value rapidly and recovered $ 20,000 before the weekend. Saturday and Sunday saw more impressive performance for the asset, which jumped over $ 22,000.

The landscape improved again after the start of the working week. This culminated in a price hike to over $ 24,000, which became the new highest price point in over a month.

However, news came that Elon Musk’s Tesla had sold nearly $ 1 billion of its BTC holdings during the second quarter. This had an immediate effect on the price of bitcoin, which has dropped by around $ 1,500 and is currently struggling below $ 23,000.

Its market cap has dropped to just under $ 450 billion, but dominance over altcoins has regained some traction and stands at 42.6%.

Alt in red

Similar to bitcoin, most altcoins have made impressive gains in recent days, but have been retraced on a daily scale.

Ethereum was among the most impressive artists. It skyrocketed from $ 1,000 to over $ 1,600 in about a week, hitting a new 40-day high. Now, however, ETH has lost around 4% and is trading just under $ 1,500.

BNB and XRP fell by similar percentages to $ 255 and $ 0.35, respectively. Other losses, however, come from Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, MATIC and Avalanche. All of them fell by up to 8%.

The two largest memecoins – Shiba Inu and Dogecoin – fell by double-digit percentages.

With most small and mid cap altcoins also in the red, the cumulative market cap of all cryptocurrencies dropped by $ 60 billion in one day. However, the metric is still well above $ 1 trillion.