The first half of 2018 has been a rough outing for Bitcoin as investors continue to unload the cryptocurrency, sending down prices almost 60 percent year-to-date and now, the latest data shows the outflow of money from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase exceeded the inflow.
According to an article in Fortune, Coinbase customers withdrew more money than they deposited in April–data extrapolated by Chime, a San Francisco, California start-up that offers free checking accounts. Withdrawals have been on the rise since December, but April marks the first time withdrawals exceeded deposits.
Bitcoin is now trading below the $6,000 mark and could be heading down more with the price falling by 3.42 percent the past 24 hours. It has been trading just slightly below $6,000 the past few hours, but a gradual decline could be on the horizon.
Chad Cascarilla, cofounder and CEO of Paxos–an institutional trading firm that operates Bitcoin exchange iBit, feels that downward pressure on the price is coming from short-term trading activity.
“You have a kind of washing out of momentum investors…investors who were not really taking a longterm point of view,” says Chad Cascarilla, the cofounder and CEO of Paxos, an institutional trading firm that operates Bitcoin exchange itBit.
The recent Coinbase exodus even caused Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to dust off a catchphrase coined by economist Robert Shiller, but made popular by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan–irrational exuberance. Armstrong was quick to extinguish any firestorms pertaining to the fall of Bitcoin that some cryptocurrency pessimists are igniting.
4/ When there is hype, people are irrationally exuberant. When there is despair, people are irrationally pessimistic. Neither is true. Reality is always somewhere in the middle, more correlated with real usage (transactions per day) than the price.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) June 19, 2018
For more trends in cryptocurrency, click here or sign up for the daily newsletter.