Robert Zach, Daniel Shvartsman

Investing.com – plunged in early morning Saturday trading, taking the torch from a risk-off week in the markets at large. At 6:15am ET, the leading cryptocurrency was trading just under $47,000, down over 16% in the last 24 hours, the biggest drop in the cryptocurrency since September 7th.

The broader crypto complex has seen similar plunges, including, , , XRP plunge double digit percentages. and The crash also involved two of the top meme tokens, namely.

This follows on Friday’s , where the S&P sold off .8% and the Nasdaq sold off nearly 2%, driven a miss on the jobs report as well as Docusign’s and the implications for the software sector. The week was marked by fears over the Omicron variant of Covid 19 – though the variant’s severity remains unclear, and it may be ultimately a positive development – as well as Fed chair Jerome Powell’s ‘retirement’ of the term , signaling that tapering plans and perhaps rate hikes will be coming in the near future, leading the market to a risk-off environment.

Bitcoin fell a little more than 5% in the last week of market trading, although the trend accelerated during Friday-Saturday overnight trades. According to the Investing.com index, bitcoin dropped from $52,000 down to a low point of $42587.8 at midnight Eastern Time before recovering to its current level.

Alt Coin and Ethereum Performance

Bitcoin is up massively over the past year. It is up at 61% for the year and trading higher than September. However, volatility remains a problem for crypto traders. This will depend on whether it is simply a pullback or if there has been a general sell-off of the crypto community.

Ethereum is down slightly less at 15%, and remains up nearly 500% for the year amidst questions over whether it might Bitcoin in the future (Bitcoin’s market cap remains nearly double Ethereum’s market cap, however). Alt coins’ performance in the past 24 hours includes:

• Solana: -18%
• Cardano: -18%
• Ripple XRP – -20%
• : -21.5%
• : -18.5%
• Binance: -14%

Based on data from CoinglassIn the last 24 hours positions of Bybt worth approximately $2.5 billion were liquidated, with BTC accounting for more than 40%. These are the crypto market lost over $ 550 billion in market capitalizationAt 7:20 GMT, it was $1.88 trillion. Then, at the time of writing, it recovered to $2.2 trillion.

Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s Levels

BTC’s fell to a low of $42,587, its lowest level since September 30. Bitcoin’s market capital fell to $896.13B or 40.92% from its total crypto market cap. Bitcoin’s market cap fell 13.5% over the past week and was down 31.2% from its November 10 high of $68,990.63

Ethereum has fallen 19.5% from its 52-week peak, but Ethereum could fall through technical support levels at around $3750 or further below at $3300/3500.

It remains to be seen how traders will react to this sharp crash and whether there’s any knock-on effects to broader markets.