Bitcoin Slides Back Below $10K Amid Quick Bearish Sell-Off

Bitcoin has dipped back below the psychological area of support near the $10,000 level amid a 20-minute sell-off that took the markets by surprise.

At around 21:30 UTC on Feb. 19, the price of bitcoin (BTC) fell more than 4.5 percent from $10,086 to $9,610, according to CoinDesk’s BPI data, despite the technical signs appearing to favor the bulls.

On exchanges like Bitstamp and Coinbase, prices dropped to as low as $9,280 before quickly being snatched up by opportunistic buyers looking to capitalize on the fall. BTC is now changing hands at around $9,719.

“I’m a long holder and even I’m shook,” said BTC investor and podcast host Brad Mills in a recent tweet.

“That usually means too much exposure,” he added.

Indeed, the sell-off caught many traders unawares as the price of BTC shed much of the gains achieved over the last few days, with BTC’s price rising out of a prior area of resistance near $9,483 on Feb. 17 to above $10,000 a day later.

So far sellers are intent on keeping prices below hourly resistances near $9,793. That will be a telling sign should prices remain below that level in the coming days, towards the end of the weekly closing session on Feb. 24.

Yassine Elmandjra, a crypto analyst at Ark Invest, said in a recent tweet that today marks BTC’s fifth-largest hourly price drop in history.

“The only other time we've seen a greater dollar price drop is at the December 2017 peak,” Elmandjra said.

Other notable cryptocurrencies are also down, with the likes of XRP$2.3642, ether ETH$3,458.70 and BCH$514.96 down between 5.5 and 8.1 percent over a 24-hour period. Tezos, on the other hand, is still trending up 5.46 percent on a 24-hour basis and one of the only crypto in the top 20 to still be in the green, Messari data shows.

UPDATE (Feb. 20, 00:25 UTC): Co-founder and managing partner at Kenetic, Jehan Chu, told CoinDesk that "today’s sell-off was nothing more than short-term profit-taking in a market gaining steam. Pullbacks like this are common and we can expect oscillations, but this year’s upward and dominant trajectory for bitcoin is clear."