Hacker attack and US inflation double kill! Bitcoin price gives back all gains! Bybit has $1.5 billion of ETH stolen.
After the minutes of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy meeting, Bitcoin saw almost three consecutive days of gains until it returned to the starting point late yesterday. As for the reason for the decline in the cryptocurrency market, it may be related to BYBIT's hacker attack, which resulted in the theft of nearly $1.5 billion worth of Ethereum. It is said that judging from the hacker's style of doing things this time, it is very likely that it was done by North Korean hackers. I will not expand on the specific circumstances of the BYBIT theft.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have given back all the gains in recent days. Since this incident involves Ethereum, many people began to worry that hackers will sell the $1.5 billion of Ethereum, causing further declines in the price of the currency. Of course, after the lessons learned from the FTX incident, some BYBIT customers are also withdrawing their cryptocurrencies, which has brought some uneasiness to the market in the short term.
In fact, the reasons for this decline also include macroeconomic factors. We saw that the US stock market fell across the board yesterday because the momentum of US economic growth weakened. The University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index fell to 64.7 in February, a month-on-month decrease of nearly 10%, a decline that exceeded market expectations.
In February, the US service sector purchasing managers index (PMI) fell into contraction territory for the first time in two years. The focus is still on concerns about US inflation - Michigan consumers' long-term inflation expectations have soared to 3.5%, which is said to be the highest since 1995. In the final analysis, it is because of concerns that Trump's new tariff policy may further push up inflation. And high inflation means that the Federal Reserve may maintain high interest rates for a longer period of time.
Speaking of the Bitcoin market, from the perspective of the relative strength index (RSI), the daily level RSI briefly broke through 50, which was the first time since the decline at the beginning of this month, indicating that the market's buying has some advantages in a short period of time and market sentiment has improved.
Yesterday we checked the data of Crypto Quant, and the open interest increased by US$2.4 billion in a short period of time. In the case of outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs, the rise of Bitcoin is closely related to the leverage effect, which can reflect the recovery of market sentiment.
