Bitcoin Loses 10% on the Week as Memecoins Tumble

Bitcoin (BTC) has plunged more than 10% over the past 7 days to a two-month low just above $26,000 alongside a sizable reversal in the previous red-hot memecoin sector.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency traded at around $26,300 at press time, a level not seen since March 17. Bitcoin’s high for the week came on Wednesday morning when it rose to $28,300 following softer than expected CPI data on Wednesday.

“Bitcoin might break below $26,000 over the weekend but it’s well bid right now,” said Laurent Kssis, crypto advisor at CEC Capital. “Clearly there are no fundamentals holding BTC up any longer and traders are concerned but it feels a short term play to increase BTC holdings at these lower levels,” he added.

Oanda analyst Ed Moya believes bitcoin is still subject to further downside pressure until the U.S. sees regulatory clarity.

Ether (ETH) was also lower for the week, though it did outperform bitcoin by a bit. It’s currently at $1,770 versus its weekly high of $2,020 touched last Saturday.

Helping to sour the mood in bitcoin were tumbling prices for some memecoins, notably pepecoin (PEPE), which is now lower by more than 60% over the past week of trade. The new token based on “pepe the frog” debuted on April and quickly rose to more than a $1 billion valuation. That’s now been trimmed to roughly $560 million.

Other memecoin decliners included dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), each of which lost about 11% over the last 7days.

"The hype of meme coins is usually exciting, but often followed by a market crash, similar to what we saw with DOGE and SHIB two years ago,” said Youwei Yang, chief economist at publicly traded bitcoin mining company, BTCM. “The market correction for memecoins this week is largely due to the calm down of the FOMO (fear of missing out) sentiment with these new memecoins.”

Altcoins were not spared in the selloff, with Aptos’ (APT), shedding 20%, and Filecoin (FIL) and Aribitrum’s (ARB) each off about 17%.