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Cryptocurrency companies’ stocks plummeted on Tuesday as investors digested disappointing U.S. economic data and fretted over a billion-dollar hack on a prominent digital assets exchange.
Trading platforms Robinhood and Coinbase’s shares closed down 8% and 6.4%, respectively. Bitcoin treasury company Strategy plummeted more than 11%, while Bitcoin miners Marathon Digital Holdings and Bitdeer plunged 9% and 29%, respectively.
The declines followed an investor retreat from cryptocurrencies and other risk-on assets that reflect concerns about the potential of a global trade war, rising inflation and wider macroeconomic uncertainties.
They come even as Coinbase and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) agreed last week to dismiss the regulator’s lawsuit against the exchange, pending commissioner approval. Since then, NFT marketplace OpenSea, trading platform Robinhood, and decentralized exchange Uniswap have all said that the SEC will drop investigations into each firm without any enforcement actions.
Bitcoin was recently trading under $89,000, down by 7% in the last week, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has fallen roughly 17% since reaching an all-time high above $108,000, and dipped to nearly $86,000 earlier Tuesday.
Ethereum, Dogecoin, XRP and Solana all fell sharply earlier Tuesday but have similarly recovered some ground.
Markets were further rocked last Friday when Bybit—the 14th-largest crypto exchange by daily trading volume, according to CoinGecko—suffered an exploit, with hackers stealing $1.4 billion in Ethereum and related tokens from the trading platform.
The hack, which was the largest crypto attack to date, helped spur Bitcoin’s decline below $90,000 for the first time in three months.
U.S. inflation has ticked upward with the consumer price index, a widely watched measure of price trends, increasing in January for its fourth consecutive month. The 3% annual CPI is higher than the U.S. central bank’s long-targeted return to 2% inflation—a stubbornness that has prompted the Federal Reserve to ratchet back its plans for multiple interest rate cuts in 2025.
President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, which he has acknowledged would trouble consumers, have also unsettled markets.
Edited by James Rubin
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