Ethereum Sinks 22% as Crypto Market Cap Falls Below $2 Trillion

Ethereum nosedived by more than 20% on Monday morning, a casualty of a badly bleeding crypto market that appears to have been dragged down by worrying signs of a potentially imminent global recession.

As Asian financial markets woke to a bloodbath early Monday, ETH plummeted some 22%, from nearly $3,000 to $2,280 at writing.

But the damage caused by Monday’s still-unfolding events was by no means contained to Ethereum. Across the board, crypto tokens have hemorrhaged billions of dollars worth of value.

Earlier this morning, the collective value of the crypto market fell beneath $2 trillion, to about $1.89 trillion at writing, per CoinGecko. This appears to be the first time that figure has fallen under $2 trillion since the onset of the latest crypto bull market earlier this spring.

Gracy Chen, the CEO of crypto exchange Bitget, attributed ETH’s hemorrhaging today in large part to macro global economic factors, including signals in the United States of a potentially looming recession, and the historic raise last week of interest rates in Japan.

Despite ETH’s decentralized nature, Chen said, the token’s fortunes are by now inescapably tied to the health of broader markets.

“All prominent and extensively traded cryptocurrencies tend to mirror the broader market dynamics, and Ether is no exception,” she told Decrypt. “Ethereum is looked upon as an indicator of the overall market conditions—much like Bitcoin.”

Bitcoin, meanwhile, fell below $50,000 on Monday, a development which, along with Ethereum’s collapse, helped triggerover $1 billion in liquidations of crypto-related positions in the last 24 hours.

While many connected ETH’s flagging fortunes as inextricably linked to the same factors that sent Asian stock markets plummeting Monday to their worst performances in decades, others saw some crypto-specific variables playing a hand in the saga as well.

In a note on Monday, Singapore-based QCP Capital acknowledged the role of broader economic developments in walloping the crypto market, while also tying ETH’s performance today to massive institutional sell-offs of the token that began on Sunday.

“The immediate trigger in crypto seems to have been aggressive ETH selling from Jump Trading and Paradigm VC,” the firm wrote, referencing massive ETH-related moves made by the crypto trading firms on Sunday.

But even those unusual trades appear to be linked to the broader global economic and political climate, which has spooked traders in recent days.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.