A historically positive month for bitcoin is off to an icy start as the total crypto market capitalization dropped 3.29% to $2.16 trillion over the last 24 hours.
Bitcoin briefly dipped below the $61,000 mark before recovering to around $61,605 at press time. Investors appeared to be trading in BTC for physical gold after global markets turned cautious amid an escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The dip in price also triggered large-scale liquidations across the crypto market. Data from CoinGlass shows that $525 million was liquidated across major crypto exchanges in the last day, with $448 million liquidated from long positions alone.
Bitcoin saw $139 million worth of liquidations, followed by Ethereum, which saw $109 million worth of liquidations. In total, over 155,000 traders were liquidated, with the single largest liquidation order taking place on a BTC/USDT pair on Binance with a value of $12.66 million.
The month of October is typically characterized by outperformance, with bitcoin returning an averaging of 20.69% in the month over the last 10 years. In fact, 2014 and 2018 were the only years where bitcoin ended October in the red.
The phenomenon has come to be known as ‘Uptober,’ but the recent price action has market participants questioning whether this month will mimic previous trends or take a different course.
Until the selloff, crypto market sentiment had been largely positive. Market intelligence platform Santiment noted that crowd sentiment towards Bitcoin had been particularly bullish leading up to this week.
“When everyone is feeling euphoric, it’s often a sign that prices are too high, and the market is ripe for a pullback,” said Santiment analysts in a recent blog post.
