Bitcoin, Ethereum Sink Further on Sunday

Bitcoin’s fall continues over the weekend, wiping it to levels not seen since January and cutting its April high nearly in half.

By around noon on Sunday, the cryptocurrency was down to $32,218.50. That’s a more than a 31% fall over the past seven days and a 16% fall over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Other cryptos were down hard, too. Ethereum’s ETH was at 50% of its recent high — falling below $1,900. That’s down more than 48% in a week. Dogecoin was at about 27 cents.

The moves lower come after a extraordinarily volatile month for the major cryptos that were ostensibly moving on tweets and statements by Telsa (TSLA) – Get Report boss Elon Musk and later on word of federal tax regulations and a Chinese crackdown on use of the digital currencies.

Over the weekend, Musk gave renewed support for cryptocurrencies, replying to another Twitter user that “The true battle is between fiat & crypto. On balance, I support the latter.”

But it was of little help, and they still sank lower.

Sunday’s levels for bitcoin were around half of the April high that saw the crypto surge past $64,000.

A week prior, Musk’s own tweets were blamed in the financial media for bringing the crypto coin down, when it slipped into the mid-$40,000 area following the Tesla honcho’s one-word Twitter post “Indeed,” that was in response to a post by another user asking, “Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings. With the amount of hate @elonmusk is getting, I wouldn’t blame him…”

That had followed earlier drops that came after Musk’s abrupt criticisms of the electricity used in the digital “mining” of bitcoin — and reversing an earlier move to allow for Tesla vehicle purchases using bitcoin.

Musk’s previous appearance on “Saturday Night Live” was also widely blamed for dogecoin’s move down, following some jokes on the cryptocurrency.

Tesla, however, had profited from bitcoin at the beginning of this year, when it earned more than a $100 million from the sale of bitcoin it had purchased before. Tesla had bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin on Feb. 8.

Despite the losses, bitcoin was valued at less than $10,000 a year ago.