BTC’s march up toward $24,000 took a brief pause after media headlines announced that Tesla had sold 75% of its Bitcoin position.
“Easy come, easy go” was the story on July 20. The day started on a positive note with Bitcoin (BTC) climbing above $24,300, only to end the official trading day in the red after less than stellar Q2 earning news showed Tesla sold 75% of its Bitcoin and Minecraft creator Mojang Studios reversed course by deciding to ban NFTs on its platform.
A potential source of the afternoon downturn can be traced to Tesla’s Q2 earnings data, which showed that the electric car company sold off 75% of its Bitcoin holdings in order to add $963 million in cash to its balance sheet.
So, not only forced selling from 3AC, $LUNA & $UST, but also Voyager, BlockFi and Celsius have been causing the markets to crash.
On top of that, Tesla did sell 75% of their #Bitcoin purchases towards cash.
That’s what caused the crash.
That’s also why we’re close to bottom.
— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) July 20, 2022
Shortly after the Tesla news broke, Bitcoin price pulled back from its daily high of $24,280 to $22,900, before stabilizing around $23,500.
Related: Bitcoin price hits $24K, but analysts say on-chain data points to an ‘inevitable’ pullback
Traders bullish estimates may have been premature
Today’s unexpected pullback may have also helped to bring a little market perspective to crypto traders who were ready to call for an end to the bear market.
Lots of you guys haven’t gone through the early months of a bear market and it shows.
You get excited over dead cat bounces and bull traps, act as if a quick pump is the end of the bear cycle.
Sadly, there is only one way to learn.
— Vlad “BTCTKVR.com” Costea ⚡️ (@TheVladCostea) July 19, 2022
While the pullback for Bitcoin has thus far been relatively mild, multiple altcoins experienced steeper declines as recent price runups created a nice opportunity for traders to book some gains.
The Ethereum layer-two solution Polygon saw an 11.5% decrease following a week in which the token value increased by 87%. Arweave (AR) saw its token price tumble by 10.84% and Filecoin (FIL) experienced a pullback of 10.2%.
On the flip side, the only tokens in the top 100 that have managed hold onto positive gains for the day are Steem (STEEM) and Reef (REEF), which recorded slight gains of 6.27% and 3.15%, respectively.
The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $1.035 trillion, and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 42.7%.
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