Bitcoin dips after topping $1800 USD

Bitcoin’s unprecedented surge seems finally at an end with the price of a coin currently at $2,374.89 CAD as of 3pm, ET, on Friday – down 5.8% in 24 hours and falling.

This slide follows a blockbuster couple of weeks for the currency which saw it surpass $1700 USD and then $1800 USD to increase its market cap to a high of $29.53 billion USD (approx. $40.5 billion CAD).

Other cryptocurrencies that have seen prices fall in the last day include Litecoin which, on Wednesday, successfully implemented Segregated Witness (SegWit).



News of this, along with Coinbase’s adoption of Litecoin – which has been described as the silver to bitcoin’s gold – caused priced to surge earlier in the week before levelling out and eventually falling yesterday, in unison with bitcoin.

The price of a Litecoin currently sits at $36.95 CAD, down roughly 10% in 24 hours.

The reasons behind bitcoin’s drop in value aren’t yet clear; it’s probable that many big investors became nervous of the coin’s huge gains and chose to sell while the value was high, and this possibly triggered a wave of panic selling (to offer a highly speculative explanation).

Bitcoin’s recent boom was likely triggered by the Japanese government’s decision, at the beginning of April, to accept the cryptocurrency as legal tender.

Since then, more than half the fiat to bitcoin trading volume has been in Japanese yen, according to CryptoCompare data.

This month’s rally has also been helped by the SEC’s decision to reconsider a bitcoin ETF in the US.