November was tough for Bitcoin. Crypto observers thought that the market has finally matured when Bitcoin was around $6,200 to $6,500 range. But after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, things went south for the crypto market including Bitcoin.
In November, Bitcoin was down 37%. It was the worst drop since April 2011 when Bitcoin lost around 39% of its value. When Bitcoin reached below $3,500, many are already thinking that this was the end for Bitcoin. Nouriel Roubini even mentioned that crypto went bust. And who wouldn’t think of it this way? Bitcoin lost around 80% of its value since its all-time high in December last year.
The market capitalization for the entire industry dipped by $70 billion for the entire month. And it isn’t just Bitcoin that was affected. Both Ethereum and Ripple also suffered losses. XRP, for instance, dropped by 18 percent for the month of November while Ethereum received heavy losses recording 43% loss for the month.
Ripple has been able to weather the storm primarily because of its partnerships with different institutions. It has partnered with banks such as Santander and has even been rumored to be building a partnership with Bank of America.
According to Michael Moro who works as the CEO of Genesis Global Trading, “It didn’t take much for the price to break down”. He also mentioned that “It’s unclear if this is a ‘bottom’ or a brief period of consolidation before next move down, but buyers are still maintaining some cash on the sidelines in case it does go lower”.
Moro also discussed the “messy” fork. He said that “While the split occurred on a different blockchain, there were still spill-over effects on other cryptos, including bitcoin”.
Is This The End?
Is this really the end for cryptos? There’s additional scrutiny in the crypto niche these days. In fact, SEC has been hunting entities selling unregistered securities. It also targeted celebrities that promoted ICOs such as Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled.
SEC Chairman Jay Clayton also mentioned that there should be changes in the crypto market before the agency will approve Bitcoin ETF. Clayton mentioned that unlike Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange that make use of surveillance technology, this isn’t seen in most crypto exchanges.
However, despite the challenges faced by the industry, there is some good news still. There are some observers who remained optimistic. You even have Tom Lee who thinks that despite a bearish market, indicators are still pointing towards a bright future. Tom Lee has been quite optimistic about Bitcoin since the very beginning thinking that it can actually reach $15K by the end of the year.
November 2018 will be remembered as the worst-performing month for Bitcoin in the last seven years in terms of month-over-month performance.
The future of Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market remains unsure at this point whether it is going to go up or down still. However, this wasn’t the only occurrence that a correction like this happened. In the last ten years, there were already a couple of times that this type of correction happened. And also, you have whales that purchased Bitcoin after the cryptocurrency dropped below $6K. This could be a sign of things to come.
