It wasn't a great weekend in the cryptospace.
Bitcoin fell into the low $42,000 level over the weekend -- a nearly 30% drop -- and its recovery to the $48,000 level was still a roughly 8% drop from Friday. Anyway, $42,000 is a lot better than zero, which is what some holders of various cryptos were looking at after hackers stole $150 million from BitMart. And last week, someone stole tokens worth $120 million from the decentralized finance platform BadgerDAO.
Still, the adage is to buy when there's blood in the streets, and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said he got on the phone (yes, the phone) to buy 150 bitcoin for his country, at an average price of $48,670.
Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, said it's no accident the big decline came during the weekend, which he said was likely the result of forced selling. "Worth noting: there is no common global regulatory framework for financial leverage associated with virtual currency trading. We've heard of 50:1 and even 100:1 leverage for those day trading these assets. No wonder you can get a random sale at inopportune times when prices start to move around unexpectedly," he said.
Putting the last week's events to the side, crypto is heading to a challenging time -- a Federal Reserve rate-hike cycle. Morgan Stanley strategist Michelle Weaver said it's one of the four major investment debates the broker's analysts identified for the next year.
"Bitcoin came from the aftermath of the global financial crisis and was a response to the Fed's quantitative easing policies and poor sentiment around traditional banking. Some retail customers are choosing cryptocurrency as they want to transact in a decentralized system without banks. However, if capital no longer remains cheap, can preferences for cryptocurrency-based transactions persist if they remain higher cost, higher risk, and less convenient than existing payment systems," she asked.