Appearing set for a run to a new record high earlier on Thursday, bitcoin (BTC) fell sharply in U.S. afternoon trading as tumbling bond markets took a toll on risk assets.
The positive price action came as President-elect Donald Trump said “we’re going to do something great with crypto” while ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, reiterating his ambition to embrace digital assets in the U.S. and create a strategic bitcoin reserve. Alongside, the European Central Bank trimmed its benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points and in its dovish policy statement hinted that more rate cuts were likely to happen.
Bitcoin rose as high as $102,500, its strongest price since last week’s all-time record above $104,000. Not only did that rally not hold, but the $100,000 level didn’t either, with the price falling to $99,800 by press time late Thursday afternoon.
Major risk assets as a group sold off as well, perhaps as Western bond markets reacted negatively to the ECB dovishness. The German 10-year Bund yield rose 8 basis points to 2.21% and the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield gained 6.5 basis points to 4.34%. U.S. stocks gave up early gains to close lower, the Nasdaq dropping 0.7% and S&P 500 0.5%. The price of gold also fell during the afternoon, shedding 1.8% to $2,706 per ounce.
Altcoins on average outperformed BTC with most members of the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index booking daily gains. Native tokens of Avalanche network (AVAX) and data provider Chainlink (LINK) were the best-performing assets in the basket, advancing 9% and 13%. AVAX was perhaps benefiting from news of a $250 million token investment led by Galaxy, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital, while Trump-affiliated decentralized finance project World Liberty Financial (WLFI) continued to purchase LINK through the day, adding $1 million more tokens in the later hours, onchain data by Arkham Intelligence showed.
The second-largest cryptocurrency ether (ETH) also outperformed BTC, holding onto a 1.5% daily gain after retracing from its session high just shy of $4,000. Analytics firm CryptoQuant said that strong spot ETF inflows and burgeoning Ethereum blockchain activity sets ETH up to reach new all-time highs above $5,000.