On Sunday evening, there is intense selling pressure on the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world. At the time of publication, the price of Ethereum (ETH), which has a market worth of $137 billion, is down 8.09%.
The FTX hacker who stole $600 million from the exchange was reportedly turning his ETH stockpile into Bitcoin on Sunday, November 20. The hacker changed all the stablecoins to Ethereum last week, gaining $288 million in ETH in the process. Crypto writer Colin Wu stated, using information from Etherscan:
"The FTX hacker address (0x59…d32b) is converting a large amount of ETH into BTC. Today, about 30,000 ETH has been exchanged into RenBTC, and 1070 BTC has been transferred to the BTC network."
Administrators are still assessing the damage FTX's bankruptcy has done. Some of the largest debtors are owed an astounding $3.1 billion by the crypto company. In addition, there are rising worries that more digital businesses may fail in the wake of the current crisis.
According to news sources from last week, cryptocurrency lender BlockFi is getting ready for a possible bankruptcy. MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab founder Christian Catalini said in a statement to Bloomberg TV:
“The FTX issues are really an urgent reminder of the need for regulatory clarity and a real regulatory framework for crypto”. The hype and speculation over the minting and trading of tokens “has generated a massive distraction from building actual products and services that reach consumers, solve actual problems.”
Ethereum Fares Worse than Bitcoin
A wider market slump is what led to today's decline in the price of ETH. At the time of publication, the overall cryptocurrency market was down 5.6% and had fallen below $800 billion. Bitcoin has also corrected more than 4%, falling below $16,000, while ETH is down 8%.
Ethereum has significantly lagged behind Bitcoin over the last few weeks. According to several analysts, the latest market sell-off may have caused the price of ETH to drop below $1,000.
All ten of the most popular altcoins have corrected by between 5 and 10%, including Ethereum.
