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Bitcoin Plunges Below $20K for First Time Since December 2020; Ether Drops Below $1K

The continuing plunge in traditional financial markets and panic about crypto lending platforms sent Bitcoin into the teens for the first time in more than 18 months.

Updated May 11, 2023, 5:29 p.m. Published Jun 18, 2022, 9:06 a.m.

Bitcoin plunges below $20K (OGNYAN CHOBANOV/Getty Images)

Bitcoin (BTC) sank below $20,000 for the first time since December 2020, losing 9.5% in the past 24 hours. At time of publication, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap was changing hands around $18,984.1 after trading at a low of $18,739.50.

Ether (ETH), the second-largest crypto, also continued its decline, falling 9.78% to about $992 at time of publication.

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The crypto panic – which began a few weeks ago with the Terra ecosystem collapse and then spread to the Celsius platform – has moved on to hedge fund Three Arrow Capital, which reportedly had its collateral liquidated by crypto lender BlockFi.

Checking traditional markets, U.S. stocks saw more massive selling on Thursday, with the Nasdaq tumbling 4.1% and the S&P 500 3.25% before a slight recovery on Friday. For the week, the Nasdaq and S&P are each lower by about 6%.

Amitoj Singh contributed to this report.

Bitcoin Markets Celsius

Greg Ahlstrand

Originally from California, I've been Asia-based since 1999, headquartered in Hong Kong and Jakarta and traveling throughout the Asean countries, Japan, Korea, the Chinese mainland and Taiwan for stories. Made Australia a couple of times, too. I started my journalism career as a news assistant at the Fresno Bee in Central California while studying the subject in school after the Navy. I went from launching and recovering helicopters on flight decks at sea to recovering papers fresh off the printer in the Bee's basement and launching them onto the editors' desks, whose editors had long since gone home for the night. Eventually, they let me stop delivering the paper and start writing stuff in it. My first beat was night cops: liquor store robberies, gang shootings, fatal car crashes (almost always alcohol related). It was an education. I am, as implied above, a U.S. Navy veteran. I served in seagoing helicopter squadrons as an aviation anti-submarine warfare technician throughout the Asia Pacific region and the Indian Ocean. I have a significant number of sailor stories to tell. I have no significant crypto holdings. Among my hobbies are welding, building stuff, home remodelling, (or knocking a house down and starting from scratch if it's too far gone to fix), riding horses and rebuilding old tractors. So far I've done a Ford 8N and a Ford 9N. It's slow going, because I live in Hong Kong and the tractors are in California, so I only get to work on them once or twice a year, for a week or two at a time - and that was before covid. I love my Lab, Cooper, whom my neighbors asked me to adopt two years ago when they moved back to Shanghai from Hong Kong. Cooper and I actually planned the whole thing -- we've known each other almost his whole life -- but his first parents are unaware of the conspiracy; and they send him Christmas presents every year.

James Rubin

James Rubin was CoinDesk's Co-Managing Editor, Markets team based on the West Coast. He has written and edited for the Milken Institute, TheStreet.com and the Economist Intelligence Unit, among other organizations. He is also the co-author of the Urban Cyclist's Survival Guide. He owns a small amount of bitcoin.