Coindesk

By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)It's the dip that keeps on dipping. Bitcoin took another hit early Friday, falling below $80,000 and taking February's decline to over 20%. That spurred a bloodbath in the broader crypto market, with ether sliding below $2,100, a level it managed to hold since August.It's not just crypto. Increased volatility in cryptocurrencies mirrors trends in traditional markets. Compare the 10% jump in the Volmex BVIV, which tracks the 30-day implied volatility in bitcoin, with the equal increase in the MOVE index, which measures the implied volatility of U.S. Treasury notes. The VIX, Wall Street's so-called fear gauge, has risen by 14%. These movements, coupled with a sell-off in growth-sensitive commodity currencies like...

As bitcoin's (BTC) price wilts, traders on crypto exchange Bitfinex are living up to their reputation of being dip buyers, offering some hope to battered crypto bulls given their track record of predicting market peaks and troughs.The number of bitcoin bought on Bitfinex with borrowed cash, a bet that the BTC price will rise and leave the investor with a profit once they've repaid the loan, has risen to more than 60,000 BTC from 50,773 this month. It's jumped 2% in the past 24 hours alone, according to data from Coinglass and TradingView.The increase in so-called margin long positions is a vote of confidence in the largest cryptocurrency, which has lost more than 20% this month and is on track...

Bitcoin (BTC) is on track for its worst month in three years, falling 22% as President Donald Trump's tariffs on major U.S. trading partners raise concerns of faster inflation, reduced chance of interest-rate cuts and lowered appetite for risky investments.The last time the largest cryptocurrency fell as much as June 2022, when it fell by more than a third. This week alone, BTC has dropped almost 18%, the steepest slide since the week ended Nov. 13 of the same year.The slide leaves investors who've bought bitcoin this year severely underwater. The average purchase price is since the start of January $97,880, and BTC dropped below $80,000 earlier Friday, leaving average buyer some 18% worse off.Historically, this isn't entirely unusual. Investors...

Remember the last time you went on vacation? After locking the door and heading toward your car, you likely turned back abruptly to ensure the lock was secure before continuing your journey.Financial markets, led by a range of human emotions, exhibit similar behaviors. After a convincing move beyond a long-held resistance, assets typically return to confirm the validity of the breakout. That serves as a test of the strength of the former resistance-turned-support, following which bigger rallies unfold.The "breakout and retest play" phenomenon is well-known across asset classes. Bitcoin's (BTC) ongoing sell-off might be just that – a healthy retest of the breakout point or the former resistance-turned-support of $73,835 breached in November.In other words, the downward momentum could run...

MetaMask, the popular self-custodial crypto wallet for the Ethereum (ETH) network, shared a flurry of announcements on Thursday, aimed at improving its wallet's user experience.Part of Metamask's revamped roadmap includes adding smart contract capabilities to its current wallet. At the moment, MetaMask is an Externally Owned Account (EOA), a type of wallet that is controlled by a public and a private key. One of the main downfalls with EOAs is that it is subject to human error, meaning if you forget your private key, you lose your crypto holdings in that account forever. The other type of wallet that exists on Ethereum are Contract Accounts (CAs), which are controlled by code and have recovery mechanisms in place and security checks...