Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images and Dado Ruvic/Reuters
- Cryptocurrencies were off to a rocky start to the week on Sunday.
- Bitcoin was down as much as 13% on Sunday, while ether was down about 15%.
- A crypto sell-off last week wiped more than $400 billion from the nascent market in a single day.
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Global cryptocurrencies stumbled on Sunday following a roller coaster week in which the two main digital currencies, bitcoin and ether, plunged by more than 30% before recovering slightly.
Bitcoin was down as much as 13% on Sunday. It was trading at about $33,751 at 11:25 AM ET on Sunday, down from its April record high of nearly $65,000. On Saturday the cryptocurrency was up as much as 8% following a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk that he supports crypto over fiat currency.
Ether, the coin linked to the Ethereum blockchain network, was down as much as 15% while litecoin fell about 18% on Sunday.
The latest bout of volatility comes after a wild week for cryptocurrencies and a multi-day selloff that sent the price of ether and bitcoin plummeting. A sudden and sharp crypto sell-off on Wednesday erased more than $400 billion from the nascent market in a matter of just 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Altcoins such as Dogecoin got caught in a similar whipsaw as prices swung 10% every few hours.
Wednesday's rout was triggered by the People's Bank of China announcement that digital tokens can't be used as a form of payment by financial institutions.
Bitcoin, which fell to just above the $30,000 mark Wednesday, pared some losses and rose 11% on Thursday before sliding again Friday after China reiterated it intends to crack down on cryptocurrency mining.
The world's best known cryptocurrency also still hasn't recovered from Musk's climate-related concerns over its mining process, which earlier this month sent shockwaves across the digital asset ecosystem.
"The cryptocurrency market is under relentless selling pressure," Nicholas Cawley, an analyst at DailyFX, told Insider last week. "The speed of the sell-off suggests that leveraged accounts are being hit badly and the indiscriminate slump across the space also points to a lack of buying intent."
Amid Wednesday's frantic trading, major crypto exchanges including Coinbase, Gemini, Binance.US, and Kraken all reported varying degrees of outages and connectivity issues.