With the recent bitcoin crash in the books, it appears traders have very much shifted to an “every man for himself” type of attitude, and nobody is really looking out for each other anymore.
Bitcoin Sentiment Is Becoming More Negative
Not long ago, bitcoin briefly dropped below the $20,000 mark, and it seems like this may have been the real clincher for several traders. Everyone is angry, sad, or feeling negative about the future of the space, and one must wonder if the asset will recover in terms of sentiment from this point on.
James Malcolm, the head of foreign exchange strategy at UBS, mentioned in a recent discussion that crypto has often survived through a spirit of collaboration and innovation that ensured people worked together to keep the space moving in the right direction. He says this isn’t obvious anymore, and traders are simply looking out more for themselves then they are for others.
He commented:
We’ve obviously been breaking big-figure levels, and that’s been pretty critical. Sentiment sours the further down we go.
The bitcoin price has been in the doldrums for the past several weeks. To be fair, the asset has been dipping into blackness ever since it reached its peak of $68,000 per unit in mid-November of last year, but this can be considered something of a fluke in many ways.
The asset reached this price and then immediately began sinking further and further down just a few days later. By the beginning of 2022, the currency was trapped in the $40,000 range, and from there, $30,000, and $20,000 followed. It was an ugly sight that ultimately saw many years of gains wiped clean off the slate.
Malcolm further stated:
There’s this narrative out there that crypto is extremely collaborative in comparison with trad-fi, and one of the things that’s become very apparent is that it’s sort of every man for himself now.
He also issued more fuel to the gloom and doom fire, commenting that the prices of bitcoin and many leading digital currencies may not improve for some time. He said:
It’s difficult to think that we’re out of the woods for a whole lot of reasons. The regulatory element, which is going to be the biggest hurdle for crypto, has yet to bite in any significant shape or form. There are a whole lot of things which suggest that prices can stay soft.
What Made This Happen?
The space has been marred by many things including inflation, the Federal Reserve continuing to hike rates as a means of combating said inflation, the death of Terra USD (an algorithmic stable currency), and Celsius halting all withdrawals.
Not since 2018 has bitcoin suffered so much. At the time of writing, the asset has lost 70 percent of its value in the last eight months.
