Bitcoin fell below US$42,000 on January 3, losing at least US$3,000 in value within two hours, according to data from CoinGecko. On CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin dropped all the way to US$40,700 from its intraday high of US$45,600 recorded at the time of writing.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $42,608, down nearly 6% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. The cryptocurrency is also down 1.5% in the last 14 days while having barely made any gains in the last 30 days.
The sharp drop in BTC price comes as digital financial services platform Matrixport retracted its latest prediction that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could potentially approve the first live Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) by January 2024.
Matrixport announced on X (formerly Twitter) on January 1 that it believes Bitcoin will surge to 50,000 US dollars, driven by factors such as "imminent spot Bitcoin ETF approval." The company also stated that a potential spot Bitcoin ETF approval could be announced even before most traders' expectations for approval on January 8, 9, or 10.
Just one day after issuing a prediction of a possible approval in 2024, Matrixport made a change in its prediction on January 2, stating that the SEC would reject all spot Bitcoin ETFs in January and that an approval of
Bitcoin investor Alistair Milne noticed that Matrixport was founded by Jihan Wu, a Chinese billionaire crypto entrepreneur and co-founder of crypto mining company Bitmain. Industry analyst James Van Straten noted that Wu was a major backer of Bitcoin Cash, a Bitcoin hard fork created in 2017.
"If anyone believes anything published by Matrixport, I have a bridge to sell you," the analyst wrote.
Some key observers of spot Bitcoin ETFs also reacted to the news. "We didn't hear anything indicating anything other than approval, but I wanted to give the person the benefit of the doubt, so I asked if he had a source or was just speculating," Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas wrote on X.
"To be clear, not saying an absolute denial is unlikely," Balchunas added. "But we're not hearing anything that suggests that."#BitcoinETF #bitcoin #btc
