Bitcoin fell below $43,000 on Thursday after minutes of the Federal Reserve’s last meeting revealed it had opted for more aggressive policies that reduced investors’ appetite for so-called riskier assets.
Bitcoin was last traded at $42,700, down 1.7%, and fell 5.2% on Wednesday, slumping below last month’s low of $42,000, its weakest level since September 2021.
In November last year, it hit a record high of $69,000.
The decline “correlated with the ‘risk off’ move across most traditional asset classes,” said Matt Dibb, COO of Singapore-based cryptofund sales company Stack Funds, pointing in particular to the decline on the Nasdaq.
The direction of cryptocurrency markets is now the same as that of traditional markets, as the number of institutions trading in both cryptocurrencies and other assets continues to increase.
Ether, which represents the ethereum network, fell 5.2% on Wednesday to its lowest level since October before recovering slightly to $3,460.
Cryptoanalysts are also waiting to see if the anti-government protests in Kazakhstan triggered by rising fuel prices will have a negative impact on the bitcoin network. The former Soviet nation currently supports the second largest concentration of bitcoin miners in the world after the U.S.