This has been a rough year for cryptocurrencies. And this week just got rougher.
At press time Bitcoin (BTC) finally began to stabilize, but not before the total crypto market wiped more than US$18 billion off the books of its already waning value in the course of a few days.
The world's largest and most widely owned digital asset began its slide Wednesday evening and fell below US$6,200 for the first time in a month, according to data from Einstein Exchange. BTC was mostly stable in the US$6,200 range as of Friday afternoon, but had kicked this week off well above US$6,500, ending the week about 5% lower.
Other alt coins cryptocurrencies fared much worse. Ethereum (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has dropped 12% of its value in just a week, while the third largest XRP (the native currency of the Ripple network) is down a whopping 18% over the same period of time. B Cash (BCH) is down 14%, while EOS has fallen 10%.
The total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies was US$201 billion today, down from US$219 billion on Tuesday. The market continues to struggle to recover to anywhere near crypto's US$820 billion peak in January.
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And the beatdown on the cryptocurrency market didn’t end there. Global economist Nouriel Roubini, one of the few who accurately predicted the 2008 financial crisis, is making sure U.S. senators don't miss his warning on cryptocurrency.
Within minutes of testifying at a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Roubini sounded alarms on multiple aspects of the new digital asset class.
The cryptocurrency world is a "stinking cesspool" and is fundamentally worth nothing, according to Roubini, who is also a professor at New York University and self-described expert on international financial markets, asset, and credit bubbles and their bust.
Roubini, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Community Affairs at a hearing that, "Crypto is the mother or father of all scams and bubbles,"
He said the first warning sign came late last year as Bitcoin neared a high of almost $20,000. Roubini told senators that "literally every human being I met between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2017" asked him if they should buy cryptocurrency,
Since the height of the frenzy late last year, Bitcoin has fallen nearly 70% in what Roubini calls "crypto-apocalypse." ETH, the digital token of the Ethereum blockchain, has plunged more than 85%; and XRP has slipped nearly 90%. The total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies is down by more than 60% for the year.
