Bitcoin and Ethereum—along with several altcoins—plummeted Tuesday, erasing nearly $400 billion in market value and all of last week’s gains.
The total value of the world’s cryptocurrencies fell to about $1.9 trillion Tuesday morning, marking a loss of $410 billion over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
On the same day El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, the cryptocurrency led the price retreat, falling 11% to a low of about $43,000, the biggest drop since mid-June. The fall comes despite some proponents on Reddit attempting to organize a movement of Bitcoin purchases to support El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption.
The retreat comes as El Salvador’s government reported issues with its state-sponsored crypto wallet, Chivo, ahead of the country’s Bitcoin adoption at 3 p.m. EST. The government said it was working to solve the technical glitches by Tuesday afternoon.
Following Bitcoin’s decline Tuesday, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced that the country purchased an additional 150 Bitcoins, and now holds 550 of the coins, about $25 million worth of crypto.
Ether also experienced a decline of nearly 12%, erasing gains that pushed the cryptocurrency past the closely watched $4,000 mark last week.
Altcoins, or crypto alternatives to Bitcoin and Ether, also fell Tuesday, with well-known coins such as Cardano’s ADA, Binance Coin, and Dogecoin dropping more than 10%.
One of the only cryptocurrencies to experience gains Tuesday was Solana’s Sol coin, which jumped 40% in 24 hours to a record of about $195, before slightly retreating.
Following a major drop in the morning, most coins pared losses in the early afternoon. Still, about $3 billion in crypto long positions were liquidated Tuesday, according to BlockWorks.
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