Investing.com – Bitcoin continued shedding value on Friday, adding to losses in its sixth of declines after having entered a bear market a day earlier.
On a day of extreme volatility, typical for the largest digital currency by market cap, Bitcoin plummeted 29.67%, or $4,893, on the Bitfinex exchange to trade at $11,534.00 by 9:07AM ET (14:07GMT). Prices have ranged from $11,555 to $16,287 in the last 24 hours.
The most popular cryptocurrency –which trades 24 hours a day, 7 days a week- hit a record high of $19,891.00 only last Sunday in the run up to CME’s launch of Bitcoin Futures.
Bitcoin officially entered a bear market, technically defined as a 20% plunge, on Thursday, with most market experts commenting that the alternative currency was long overdue for a correction.
Since that Sunday top, the alternative currency is currently down around 42% at the time of writing. However, Bitcoin has still rallied around 1,100% from just under $1,000 at the beginning of the year and maintains gains of nearly 16% in December alone.
Unlike recently, cryptocurrency rivals were not benefitting from the selloff in the leading coin. Some observers suggested that investors were cashing in on stellar gains across the board as they closed their books ahead of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
At 9:10AM ET (14:10GMT), Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap after bitcoin, plummeted 33.52% to $528.38 but was only off around 1.6% in the last 7 days.
Bitcoin-offshoot Bitcoin Cash led the declines on Friday, plunging 48.49% to $1,901.70. Despite the slide, the currency that was the result of the “fork” from the world’s largest digital currency on August 1 in a move that was designed to be able to process transactions more quickly at a lower cost held onto weekly gains of around 30%.
Similarly, Ripple - designed for banks and global money transfers and with one of the more affordable price tags- fell 21.29% to $0.7540 after having just having passed the historical milestone of $1 a day earlier. Still, the “low-cost” bitcoin alternative held gains in the last seven days of 20%.