Bitcoin Plunges Below $16,000, Correction Started? (Market Watch)

After marking a new yearly high of $16,500, BTC now seems to be retracing. The cryptocurrency dropped to as low as $15,750 and recovered to where it’s currently trading at $15,880. Most altcoins are following suit.

The Correction Begins?

There’s a saying for traders that goes – ‘what goes up, must come down.’ In other words, it’s completely typical and healthy market behavior for prices to correct. This gives buyers the opportunity to consolidate and continue accumulating.

Bitcoin pushed to as high as $16,500 over the week, charting an increase of more than 6% over the past seven days. This is massive. Naturally, the market started correcting today.

The price for the cryptocurrency dropped to as low as $15,750 today on Binance, meaning that it lost around $600 of its dollar value. Bitcoin has since recovered a bit and it currently trades at around $15,880. It’s interesting to see whether or not it will continue dumping or if this was the correction before the next leg up.

Altcoins Follow Suit

For the largest part, Bitcoin’s dominance has remained unchanged and it still rests at slightly below 65%. In other words – altcoins failed to capitalize on this negative move.

This can be seen across the board with a few exceptions. Ethereum s down about 1.2% and it currently trades at $458. Binance Coin is also down about 2 percent to $27.5, while Cardano lost 4% to trade back at $0.10. Link, Polkadot, Tezos, and other large-cap cryptocurrencies are also down somewhere in the same range.

The main exception from the top 10 is Ripple’s XRP. The cryptocurrency, despite performing like a stablecoin throughout the past couple of weeks, is up almost 3% and it trades at $0.264.

Double-digit gains are evident from lower and mid-cap altcoins, and especially DeFi tokens again. SushiSwap (21%), ABBC Coin (20%), and Uniswap (18%) complete the top three gainers.

THORChain (11%), Waves (11%), NEAR Protocol (10%), and Nexo (10%) follow.