After dipping to a low of $19,939 early Wednesday morning, bitcoin (BTC-USD) is fighting to find support back above the $20,000 mark.
The day’s trading comes at the ending of a painful last two months, during which investors have seen crypto’s total market cap shrink by 47%, from $2.1 trillion on May 1 to $891 billion as of Wednesday afternoon.
This move in bitcoin also comes as noted bitcoin bull Michael Saylor said Wednesday his company, MicroStrategy (MSTR), purchased another $9.9 million worth of bitcoin between May 3 and June 28 at an average price of $20,817. Saylor’s latest purchase brings the company’s total bitcoin holdings to $2.5 billion based on bitcoin’s current value.
The company has spent some $3.98 billion buying bitcoin, acquiring the cryptocurrency at an average purchase price of approximately $30,664 per bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses, per its latest filing with the SEC.
“If you look out four years and base your decision making on fundamentals, I think you’d conclude that bitcoin is the right choice for a treasury reserve asset,” Saylor said during an interview with Yahoo Finance last Friday, adding that 2022 is shaping up to be the worst year in the past five decades for most risk assets.
Following the $50 billion collapse of the Terra and its tokens LUNA and UST, a number of crypto firms are financially running aground, including crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which reportedly entered liquidation on Wednesday. These liquidations have dampened sentiment across the space.
Down 58% since the start of 2022, some of bitcoin’s strongest critics have articulated its failure to fulfill the role that advocates claim it serves, such as an inflation hedge or store of value.
More recently, Brent Donnelly, a global macro trader and president of Spectra Markets, suggested the world’s largest cryptocurrency acts as a hedge not against inflation, but instead loose monetary and fiscal policy.
“Bitcoin is younger than either of my two sons. This is [bitcoin’s] first cycle that features institutional adoption, we should not be 100% sure that the next cycle should look the same as this one. Even the long-standing and well-known relationship between Fed policy and stocks is somewhat unstable,” Donnelly noted.
David Hollerith covers cryptocurrency for Yahoo Finance. Follow him @dshollers.
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