Bitcoin price drops to $52K, liquidating almost $10B

Bitcoin (BTC) fell to sudden lows of $52,000 on April 18 in a timely reminder of how price action often follows hash rate. Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed a brutal hour for Bitcoin bulls everywhere early on Sunday as the market went from $59,000 to $52,000 in minutes. Having lost $60,000 support earlier in the weekend, BTC/USD was still fairly stable before the snap price event, which liquidated positions worth almost $10 billion over the past 24 hours.

At around $7,000, the hourly loss challenges the record reversal seen in February after Bitcoin hit $58,000 for the first time. In the aftermath, analysts pointed to two events as potential causes: a hash rate crash and rumors from unnamed sources that United States regulators were about to charge unnamed “financial institutions” with crypto-related money laundering.

Hash rate — an estimate of the computing power dedicated to the network by miners — crashed by almost half according to some estimates. This was due to a mass outage in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a large number of miners, which began two days ago. In a classic depiction of the old adage, “price follows hash rate,” BTC/USD then caught up with reality. “Price and hash rate has always been correlated,” statistician Willy Woo argued, pointing to a similar event from November 2017. Woo added that as then, the impact on price action was temporary and that hash rate had meanwhile already “almost fully recovered.”