Bitcoin sinks below $30,000 for first time since January

The price of bitcoin has dropped below $30,000, wiping out almost all of its gains for the year, with a sweeping regulatory crackdown putting the world’s leading digital asset under persistent pressure.

Bitcoin fell as much as 8 per cent on Tuesday to $29,872 in the latest leg of a sell-off that has pulled the cryptocurrency down more than 50 per cent from its April peak of almost $65,000.

The drop in bitcoin has cascaded across many other parts of the digital asset market, knocking “alt-coins” such as ether and dogecoin.

A crackdown by global authorities seeking to rein in the largely unregulated market has gained steam in recent weeks.

China, which was one of the world’s most important digital currency markets, has banned the mining of bitcoins in major provinces — an essential process needed to record and verify transactions and create new coins. On Monday, the country’s central bank warned several of its largest state-owned banks and Jack Ma’s Alipay to “investigate and identify” bank accounts facilitating cryptocurrency trading and block all corresponding transactions.

Fundstrat, a boutique research house based in New York, said the selling that began on Monday was “largely driven by regulatory pressures from China”. Trading volumes on Monday across major exchanges tracked by Goldman Sachs surged to the highest level in about four weeks.

This month, global regulators called for cryptocurrencies to carry the toughest bank capital rules of any asset, arguing that requirements for holding bitcoin and similar tokens should be far higher than those for conventional stocks and bonds.

Bitcoin last dropped near this level in May, when a combination of a crackdown on coin mining and usage in China, and an acknowledgment by bitcoin champion Elon Musk of the industry’s environmental impact, sent the price spiralling lower. That episode demonstrated that when crypto prices fall, the lurches lower can be rapid.

Shares in software company MicroStrategy, which has bought large quantities of bitcoin, fell nearly 8 per cent pre-market.