Bitcoin saw a decline on Thursday following the decision by the US Federal Reserve to keep interest rates unchanged and the indication that rate cuts might be delayed. The downward movement was also influenced by a mixed launch of investment products tracking Bitcoin and rival ether in Hong Kong. At 12.02 pm IST, Bitcoin was down 3.3% at $57,629, while Ethereum dropped by 1.5% to $2,920.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell stated that a rate hike was unlikely, but mentioned that a rate cut would be considered only if inflation eased further in the economy. The global cryptocurrency market cap declined by 2.4% to around $2.16 trillion in the last 24 hours.
Other major crypto tokens such as BNB, Dogecoin, Toncoin, Shiba Inu, NEAR Protocol, and Uniswap also fell, while Solana, XRP, Cardano, and Polkadot surged up to 5%. The volume of all stablecoins is now $98.61 billion, which is 92.67% of the total crypto market 24-hour volume.
Bitcoin’s market cap fell to $1.132 trillion, with a dominance of 52.53%. BTC volume in the last 24 hours rose 29.5% to $49.6 billion. The CoinDCX Research Team mentioned that technically, BTC is now more than 20% down from its all-time high and may drop further if it goes below the $57,000 support level.
Despite the downturn, the ETH/BTC pair remains strong, indicating relative strength in some altcoins. The CoinDCX team stated that although most altcoins are in the red, a few are showing gains amidst Bitcoin’s decline.