Bitcoin Barely Clings to $20,000 as US CPI Data for August Rattles Crypto Market

A strong US consumer price index (CPI) print for August sent short-term Treasury yields higher, which charged the US Dollar and subsequently sent the crypto market spiralling. As things stand, the value of Bitcoin has witnessed a dip of over 8 percent in the last 24 hours with its price now hovering above the $20,000 (roughly Rs. 15.94 lakh) mark across global exchanges while Indian exchanges like CoinSwitch and CoinDCX value BTC at $22,084 (roughly Rs. 17.6 lakh), 5.19 percent lower than that on Tuesday morning.

On global exchanges like CoinMarketCap, Coinbase, and Binance the price of Bitcoin stands at $20,348 (roughly Rs. 16.22 lakh) while CoinGecko data shows that BTC's value continues to sit 8 percent higher than where it stood last Tuesday.

Just below the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, Ether witnessed a major drop off in value too, despite the enthusiasm around the 'Merge' due over the next few days. As things stand, Ether is valued at $1,751 (roughly Rs. 1.4 lakh) across Indian exchanges while values on global exchanges see the crypto's value at $1,615 (roughly Rs. 1.28 lakh), where the cryptocurrency's value has slipped up by 5.22 percent over the past 24 hours.

Ether's showing over the first two days of the week sees the cryptocurrency's value drop and yet remain higher than where it was last week, CoinGecko data suggests that the world's second-largest crypto asset is still valued at 3.3 percent higher than last week.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reveals that most major altcoins had a similarly poor reaction to the fresh US CPI data. The global crypto market capitalisation also witnessed a drop of 6.18 percent through late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, Cardano, Polygon, TRON, Uniswap, Monero, Avalanche, Chainlink, and BNB all saw heavy losses over the last 24 hours.

Memecoins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin also followed most altcoins with losses to show for it. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.06 (roughly Rs. 4.82) after losing 4.09 percent in value over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000012 (roughly Rs. 0.00098), down 3.63 percent over the past day.

"Bitcoin and crypto assets plunged upon the release of the US August CPI print, as the 8.3 percent inflation print exceeded economists' expectations of 8.1 percent while still marking a 20 basis point decline against July's numbers. This could suggest that the inflation has peaked narrative may have been slightly premature as the consensus in the market is that the FED will most probably hike by 75 bps this September 21 at the next FOMC meeting.

The resulting volatility resulted in about $104 million (roughly Rs. 829 crore) worth of crypto liquidations within an hour in the immediate aftermath of the announcement marking the removal of over-leveraged speculative positions in the market. The crypto market cap looks poised to retest the $1 trillion (roughly Rs. 79,69,409 crore) level on the backdrop of more negative macroeconomic data as crypto prices have become intertwined with other risk assets as the correlation between crypto and equities continues to be extremely tight," the research team at CoinDCX tells Gadgets 360.

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