Bitcoin Plunges Toward $43K as Crypto Markets Take a Breather (Market Watch)

The past 24 hours saw a rollercoaster of performance in the cryptocurrency market, with most of the coins charting both multi-month heights and, subsequently, declines in the past hours.

Bitcoin is no exception, so let’s have a look.

Bitcoin’s Price Unable to Conquer $44K… for Now

Bitcoin’s price gave mixed signals throughout the past 24 hours. The cryptocurrency attempted to breach above $44K on two separate occasions throughout that time frame. It was unsuccessful in both of them, as it can be seen in the chart below.

It appears that the bulls are taking a breather and their momentum is currently halted.

This has also had an impact on the derivatives market. Data from Coinglass reveals how many long and short positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours, broken down into different time intervals:

Clearly, in the past hour, while the price was dipping considerably, long positions got caught off guard, resulting in some close to $14 million in liquidations.

It’s interesting to see if this is the beginning of a deeper correction or an intra-day dip.

Altcoins Also Retrace

The heatmap attached below paints a clear picture of the ongoing market correction. As it can be seen, most of the leading altcoins are also retracing, with slight exceptions.

Of course, there are certain altcoins in the top 100 (by market cap), which are performing exceptionally well despite the retrace.

BitTorrent (BTT) is one such example. The cryptocurrency exploded by some 100% yesterday, and remains up 42% for the past 24 hours. It is currently the best performer from the top 100 coins, followed by WEMIX, which is also up around 30% in the same time frame.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s PYTH – the native cryptocurrency of the Solana-based Pyth Network. The altcoin lost 14.3% during the same time.