Bitcoin's Price Falls to $7,600 Low as Market Continues to Dip

Bitcoin experienced a volatile morning Thursday after prices fell to $7,530, reaching its lowest dip since November 2017. The nosedive happened less than a day after prices peaked at $8,150. Traders blamed the drop on Twitter banning all cryptocurrency advertisements from its platform.

Given the new mainstream investors and retail traders swaying the market, blaming Twitter might be an overreach. Sell volumes had initially intensified across most major cryptocurrency exchanges on Thursday, most likely due to the spike in volumes in the U.S. bitcoin futures market operated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange, or Cboe, and CME Group. These investors from the traditional stock-trading industry have been welcomed in the crypto community, generating optimism that the futures market would lead to an improvement in crypto’s liquidity.

While the entrance of these investors did help the cryptocurrency market’s liquidity, analysts now believe the futures market has had a negative impact on the cryptocurrency market over the past few months. Institutional investors like Cboe and CME have not been able to affect directly the price of crypto exchanges. Rather, the futures market has allowed retail traders to move large sums and influence pricing.

Twitter’s latest ban makes it the third tech giant to outlaw cryptocurrency advertising after Facebook and Google. However, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey still believes bitcoin could overthrow the U.S. dollar, and the move to ban ads seems to be in response to the aggressive advertising used by frequently sketchy initial coin offerings. According to Nathaniel Poppers of the New York Times, the vast majority of ICOs were scams anyway, and Twitter’s move wouldn’t have a direct impact on bitcoin.

Even if blaming the price drop on Twitter is an overreach, traders will continue to struggle for clarity on short-term performance after Thursday’s fall. Meanwhile, those who are still optimistic that bitcoin will bounce back point to the latest inclusion of traditional investors, expecting this to mean future regulatory improvements and long-term health for bitcoin moving forward.

Focusing on long-term trends might be bitcoin’s best strategy. Whether the price drop was due to banned social media ads or a volatile futures market, most analysts agree it’s unlikely bitcoin will recover in the next few weeks.